Soviet Energy Humanities: Resource Extraction in the Russophone Imagination

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Throughout the Soviet Union’s history, Soviet politics and ideology have been entwined with the nation’s energy policy, a connection canonized by Lenin’s 1920 statement that “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” From early Soviet panegyrics to industrial Prometheanism to protests of environmental disaster in Baikal and Chornobyl in late Soviet literary journals, this entanglement has left a rich body of literary discourse in its wake. This panel will examine the various ways in which energy politics and their aftermath shaped Soviet literature throughout the country’s history. We ask: how were fossil fuels, whaling, hydroelectricity, and other energy sources represented in Soviet media? How did natural resource extraction and the changes it wrought on local ecosystems manifest in symbolic geographies of Soviet space? What discursive strategies did environmentally minded writers use to critique such policies and their aftermath? Drawing on a variety of regional and disciplinary approaches for talking about literature and the environment including Indigenous studies, animal studies, ecopoetics, and environmental history, we examine how energy has shaped culture in the Soviet context.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Katherine Bowers, U of British Columbia (Canada)

Papers

• Lighting Fires over the Taiga: Symbolic Geographies of Siberian Hydroelectricity - Maria Karen Whittle, UC Berkeley

• Matyoras of the Evenki - Tatiana Filimonova, Dartmouth College

• Faster Than Light: The Poetics of Fuel Economy and Utopia in Ivan Yefremov’s 'Andromeda' - Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen, U of Michigan

Discussant

• Anindita Banerjee, Cornell U