Intellectual Practices under Conditions of Unfreedom

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in Slavic lands, literary works and personal documents have often been created—and sometimes published—under conditions of unfreedom. Poetry and diaries were written during the blockade of Leningrad in 1941-1944, reaching the reader only in recent years. Representations of the Holocaust were created and published in the Ukrainian city of Lviv in 1944-1946, and soon forbidden. The anticosmopolitan campaign in Leningrad University in 1946-1950 was documented in the “notes” of the philologist Olga Freidenberg, unpublished to this day. And in 2022-2023, stories written by the human-rights activist Maksim Znak in a Belorusian prison appeared in print, in Russia and the West.
What do we learn from the cases that belong to different historical moments and social contexts? What is the liberating potential of creating under unfreedom? What are the dangers and limitations? What if such creations show traces of restrictions and damage? What are the ethical problems of publishing such works? And what about the ethics of reading?

This roundtable brings together scholars and practitioners (a poet, a translator, a publisher, an editor) to reflect on these problems in a conversation with each other and to speak about our situation today.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Irina Paperno, UC Berkeley

Roundtable Members

• Polina Barskova, UC Berkeley

• Ostap Kin, Stanford U

• Irina P

• Katharina Raabe, Suhrkamp Verlag (Germany)