People on the Edge: Expressing Anxiety in Russian and Soviet History and Culture

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

This roundtable uses the concept of anxiety as a powerful tool to analyze narratives of fear, complaint, and dissatisfaction that have been persistent in Russian everyday life and culture. How has anxiety been communicated via historical documents and cultural texts? What motivates one to transfer their feelings from a private into a public sphere? And what are the techniques of shaping and vocalizing anxiety? The roundtable will open with Rebecca Friedman’s insight into the ways in which temporal narratives in textual and visual sources from the late nineteenth-century until today contain discourses of anxiety, whether focused on speed or loss or the uncertain future. From anxiety coded through time, the roundtable will move to spatial narratives of this concept in the talks by Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, who will focus on how early Soviet urban residents used petitions and complaints where they expressed anxieties about the severe deficit of housing to transcend the ever-present worries of shortages and by Katherine Zubovich, who will examine letters of complaint written by urban residents of the late Soviet era, which served as an outlet for angst about living conditions, evictions, etc., but also mobilized anxiety as a way to persuade Soviet officials into action. Olga Kim will shift the focus from traditional cityscapes to the affective landscape in cinematic non-places of late Soviet era to study anxiety as a visual tool of the film made on the peripheries. The roundtable will conclude with Tatiana Klepikova’s examination of subversive portrayals of children as loci of anxiety about the future in contemporary Russian queer culture.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology/Cultural Studies

Chair

• Tatiana Klepikova, U of Toronto (Canada)

Roundtable Members

• Rebecca Friedman, Florida International U

• Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, Christopher Newport U

• Olga Kim, U of Pittsburgh

• Tatiana Klepikova, U of Toronto (Canada)

• Katherine Zubovich, U at Buffalo, SUNY

Session Manager

• Tatiana Klepikova, U of Toronto (Canada)