Fearing and Embracing Aging

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In a 2017 edited volume, this panel’s commentator Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl calls on scholars of Slavic literatures to bring the wealth of depictions of aging in those literatures into conversation with contemporary literary gerontology. This panel responds to that call by drawing on philosophical and poetic texts in Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian. Our first panelist notes that more than their predecessors, late-19th-century thinkers asked how a person might age well, and they imagined methods for avoiding bodily or cognitive decline. They cast aging as a problem to be understood in practical, literary, or societal terms. The next three panelists examine poets who focus on their own aging. Mikhail Zenkevich, who lived to 87, consistently feared death and aging over his long and variegated life. Krystyna Miłobędzka, now in her 90s, conveys a temporality of timelessness. Contemporary Ukrainian women poets notice that the ongoing war has aged them prematurely, or not allowed them to age appropriately. Taken together, these papers show writers finding distinctive and surprising meaning, beauty, or horror in the seemingly universal biological process of aging.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Gabriella Safran, Stanford U

Papers

• Aging as a Problem in Turn-of-the-Century Philosophy - Inessa Medzhibovskaya, The New School

• Old Age and Death in the Poetry, Prose, and Translations of Mikhail Zenkevich - Svetlana V. Cheloukhina, CUNY Queens College

• The Subsistence of the Aging Voice: Krystyna Miłobędzka’s Encapsulation of Present-Time in 'Gubione' (2008) - Alex Braslavsky, Harvard U

• Aging with a War: Ukrainian Poets Mark Time - Amelia Glaser, UC San Diego

Discussant

• Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl, U of Graz (Austria)

Session Manager

• Aliide Naylor, Independent Scholar