the importance of silenced peoples:
comparative literaure in the post-Soviet world
(from Eastern Europe and Baltic countries to Central Asia)
The Soviet Union used to be called the prisonhouse of nations. After its collapse, some, like Georgia, Lithuania, or Estonia, gained political independence and the right to autonomous cultural expression. Others, like Chechnya, became traumatized losers of genocidal wars. As the example of Ukraine indicates, independence once obtained may also be put under a blood-red interrogation mark.
To the Western eye, those nations often remain invisible and inaudible, muffled by Russia, dwarfed by its cultural supremacy. Yet studying those silenced peoples is more than an act of justice. Both Eastern Europe as a part of the oppressive structures of the former Warsaw Pact, Caucasus, and Central Asia constantly reinvent their past, present, and future through original literature. It has never been put into the limelight through the influential current of scholarship that might be compared to the postcolonial school. For a long time, it was unclear to what degree or under which conditions the postcolonial tools could be applied to the post-Soviet realities. One of the few authors who reflected on such problems was a Polish-American scholar Ewa Thompson. Yet a significant part of this enormous field remains unexplored, almost untouched by researchers. Most of those who ever care to study Slavic languages and literatures find sufficient thrill in the main, dominant strands of Russian culture, in its Pushkins, Tolstoys, and Akunins. Nonetheless, the real-life lies beneath, in the oppressed layers of nations without a history, small ethnic groups, peoples lost in the vast, indefinite space between Fergana Valley and Kamchatka, those whose languages no one understands, and who refuse (or not) to communicate with the world through Russian.
Although I was born almost at Europe's farthest frontier, the post-Soviet world appears to me as dark, full of ominous signs, unnamed dangers, and monsters lurking at the very bottom of the mental formation of apparently decent people. Its literature speaks of trauma and catastrophe, and worse, of stagnant survival. Not a pleasant kind of reading, one might say. Yet it remains essential.
To the Western eye, those nations often remain invisible and inaudible, muffled by Russia, dwarfed by its cultural supremacy. Yet studying those silenced peoples is more than an act of justice. Both Eastern Europe as a part of the oppressive structures of the former Warsaw Pact, Caucasus, and Central Asia constantly reinvent their past, present, and future through original literature. It has never been put into the limelight through the influential current of scholarship that might be compared to the postcolonial school. For a long time, it was unclear to what degree or under which conditions the postcolonial tools could be applied to the post-Soviet realities. One of the few authors who reflected on such problems was a Polish-American scholar Ewa Thompson. Yet a significant part of this enormous field remains unexplored, almost untouched by researchers. Most of those who ever care to study Slavic languages and literatures find sufficient thrill in the main, dominant strands of Russian culture, in its Pushkins, Tolstoys, and Akunins. Nonetheless, the real-life lies beneath, in the oppressed layers of nations without a history, small ethnic groups, peoples lost in the vast, indefinite space between Fergana Valley and Kamchatka, those whose languages no one understands, and who refuse (or not) to communicate with the world through Russian.
Although I was born almost at Europe's farthest frontier, the post-Soviet world appears to me as dark, full of ominous signs, unnamed dangers, and monsters lurking at the very bottom of the mental formation of apparently decent people. Its literature speaks of trauma and catastrophe, and worse, of stagnant survival. Not a pleasant kind of reading, one might say. Yet it remains essential.
selected essays in East European & post-Soviet studies
Frames of hunting. Grievable animal life in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the DeadAlif, 45/2025.
|
|
Desdemona Syndrome. Advocacy and agency in Agnieszka Holland's The Green Border
[in progress]
Agnieszka Holland's film thematizing the problem of pushbacks and violation of human rights on the border between Poland and Belarus provoked enormous outcry in the director's homeland. Nonetheless, the main focus of the criticism implied in the cinematographic narration remained unnoticed. The figure that appears in the center is not a refugee, but an activist. In the second plan, there is a figure of a border guard. The illuminating aspect comes to the fore in the Epilogue, presenting the existence of a dual border and a dual refugee problem in Poland. The treatment of people on the Belarusian and Ukrainian frontier is presented in sharp contrast. The short, final dialogue between two border guards is treated as the key to the film's meaning.
Life wins in the West.
|
|
The shipwreck and the wreath.
Dissolution of identities in Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea
|
[forthcoming publication]: Literatura, 2/2024. The article presents a reading of Ruta Sepetys' novel Salt to the Sea in the context of the philosophical proposal of Hans Blumenberg, who tried to capture the dynamics of European cultural and intellectual history through the metaphor of shipwreck. This pessimistic theory of modernity as a cycle of catastrophes is counterbalanced by the new vision of transcultural becoming and the theory of dissolution of cultures proposed by Wolfgang Welsch. The analysis of Ruta Sepetys' literary vision of the end of the Second World War accentuates the element of deconstruction of monolithic identities and their manipulative potential. Instead, individual decisions and responsibility come to the fore. The metaphor of Saint John's Night traditional wreath, resuming the intermingling of minor identifications and the plurality of origins, might replace the ominous metaphor of shipwreck proposed by Blumenberg as a key for the understanding of a new epoch of European history. |
|
Speaking of silenced disasters. Youth, History and death in Dato Turashvili's Flight from the USSR and Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea
[in progress]
The article establishes a comparative reading of two novels thematising catastrophes: Dato Turashvili's Flight from the USSR (2008) and Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea (2016). Both texts revisit historical events in which lost lives, initially placed beyond the Butlerian “frames of war”, had been treated as unworthy of grief. The parallel reading focuses on the elemental dimension of History depicted in the analysed texts, as well as the affective responses of young protagonists confronted with violence and oppression. Yet another common denominator is the trans-peripheral vision, accentuating solidarity between the peoples oppressed by the Soviet Union, such as Georgia and the Baltic countries. Finally, both novels sketch visions of resilience in confrontation with the catastrophe, even if such an attitude may cross the frontier of delusion, proclaiming the triumph of dream over the reality. The common aim of the analysed writers is to speak of death to young readers and to make them aware of the constant presence of elemental, ineluctable History, depicted as a suspended menace that looms over individual destinies.
