Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora (1919-1939) (The Real Twentieth Century) - Hardcover

Slobin, Greta

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1618112147 ISBN 13: 9781618112149

Publisher: Academic Studies Press, 2013

Synopsis

This book presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues: with the emerging Soviet Union and with the dizzying world of European modernism that surrounded them in the West. The book's chapters address generational differences, literary polemics and experimentation, the heritage of pre-October Russian modernism, and the fate of individual writers and critics, offering a sweeping view of how exiles created a literary diaspora. The discussion moves beyond Russian studies to contribute to today’s broad, cross-cultural study of the creative side of political and cultural displacement.

About this title

About the Author:

Greta Slobin (PhD Yale University) was professor of literature at University of California-Santa Cruz and also taught at Amherst College, Wesleyan University, and SUNYAlbany. She was a long-time Senior Research Fellow at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University and spent a year at Harvard University on an NEH fellowship. Her previous publications include Aleksei Remizov: Approaches to a Protean Writer and Remizov’s Fictions: 1900–1921. Nancy Condee is on the Slavic and Film Studies faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been Director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies for over a decade (1995–2006) and is a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College (Oxford University). She is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including Kinokultura, Critical Quarterly, and Russian Studies in Literature. She has served for six years as Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is author of Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution and coauthor with Michael Holquist of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Review:

"Greta Slobin's highly illuminating study on Russian emigre writing of the 1920s-1940s is an important contribution to the area of Russian twentieth-century studies. Its conceptually sophisticated theoretical framework enables Slobin to offer significant insights into the artistic imagination, memory wars and cultural politics of the most influential representatives of Russian diaspora, including Bunin, Remizov, Nabokov, Tsvetaeva and Adamovich. Being well aware of the importance of the Pushkin myth and the Doestoevsky myth to the construction of the national identity among Russian emigre communities, Slobin suggests that the re-discovery of the works of Ivan Turgenev in the 1930s enabled Russian emigre authors in France to preserve the sense of cultural continuity. In an impressive way, Slobin manages to elucidate many complexities associated with the reception of Russian emigre culture of the first wave in the post-Soviet Period. It is likely to be an indispensable source of information on Russian diaspora of the 1920s-40s for many years to come."

About this edition

• Publisher: Academic Studies Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1618112147
• ISBN 13: 9781618112149
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 300
• Editor: Condee Nancy, Clark Katerina, Slobin Mark, Slobin Dan