Guilt and Responsibility: Memory Politics and Cultural Transfer in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Our panel asks how Soviet and post-Soviet cultures interacted with Western European and American culture in the field of memory politics, what narratives they developed, and how they engaged with Western concepts of working through the past. We want to examine different strategies of interaction between authors and translators in Soviet, Russian and Soviet non-Russian culture (Soviet Latvia). How they navigated under conditions of censorship, political control or restriction, and what new discursive forms were adopted in the post-Soviet space. We would like to focus not only on reception, but also on cases of mutual transfer, when actors from two different cultures enter into a dialog and offer corresponding or complementary concepts.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Olga Rosenblum, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (Germany)

Papers

• Hemingway in Soviet Latvia: A Study of Cultural Memory and Ideological Translation - Evita Badina, Daugavpils U (Latvia)

• Notes of a Hiob: Evgenia Ginzburg in a Dialog with Heinrich Böll - Natalia Borisova, U of Tübingen (Germany)

• The 'Buffalo Sacrament' and Other Ways of Engaging with Evil in 1960s-1980s Prose - Olga Rosenblum, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (Germany)

Discussant

• Elena Mikhailik, U of New South Wales (Australia)