Meta-Languages of Empire: Russophone Authors and the Russian Language

• In Event: Liberating the Russian Language: Russophone Literature in the New Diaspora(s)

Abstract

In the years since the outbreak of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian-language poets located outside of the Russian Federation, both long-term members of Russophone diasporas and new migrants, along with opposition-minded poets who remain in Russia, have produced an outpouring of new anti-imperial poetry. Much of this writing remains unpublished and difficult to access, in a reflection of the disorder wrought by the war on Russian-language literary publishing outlets and networks. One theme present across much of this corpus of wartime writing relates to the poet’s relationship to the Russian language itself. How, these poets ask, should one write—can one write—in a language that has been revealed as an instrument of imperial domination? In this presentation, I will examine metalinguistic poems by Maria Malinovskaia, Galina Rymbu, Aleksandra Petrova, and others in order to catalogue the literary devices and rhetorical strategies they employ to attempt to wrest the Russian language free from imperial power. As these poets demonstrate, language is never simply a neutral, transparent medium of communication. Yet neither is it always just an emanation of national being or hegemonic ideology. Russophonia is not necessarily Russiacentric.

Author

• Kevin Mercer Forsyth Platt, U of Pennsylvania