Soviet Multinational Literature: Between Identity Politics and the Discourse of Empire

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel will focus on different aspects of Soviet multinational literature, such as memoirs about childhood, rhetoric about the brotherhood of Soviet people, and the political activism of Soviet writers at the time of the institutional collapse of Soviet multinational literature during the Perestroika period. The juxtaposition of various themes, genres, and tropes will indicate the differences and similarities in presenting Soviet imperial imagination as expressed in literary texts and the activities of various literary institutions. The panel intends to explore both conservative and liberating functions of the multinational discourse within the Soviet–era literary paradigm.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Karen Petrone, U of Kentucky

Papers

• Little Subjects of a Big Empire: Identity Legacy in Childhood Recollections in Twentieth-Century Soviet Literature - Marina Balina, Illinois Wesleyan U

• Tropology of Brotherhood: Poetics of Stalinist Imperial Imagination and Homogenization of Soviet Space - Evgeny A. Dobrenko, U of Venice (Italy)

• Writers as Politicians: Multinational Soviet Literature during Perestroika and in the 1990s - Klavdia Smola, U of Dresden (Germany)

Discussant

• Maria Y. Khotimsky, MIT