Current Fellows

As the last thirty years have been a time of massive nationalization and de-Sovietization of culture in the former republcs, the institutional infrastructure and even the memory of Multinational Soviet literature (MSL) have been largely erased. In recent years, however, Slavic studies in the West have shown greater interest in MSL for both its role as a massive and influential instance of world literature and for the postcoloniality of its constituent literatures. Written in over 70 languages, over the course of over 70 years, however, MSL remains an unwieldy object of study. My book project focuses its account of it through three organizing principles: the literary magazine Friendship of the Peoples, which not only made available some of the canonical texts of MSL to the all-Soviet reader but also has the benefit of being a concrete object with an excellent archive and connections to other MSL institutions; the Künnstlerroman (the artist's novel), one of the non-Russian Soviet writers favorite literary vehicle for thematizing the uneven and combined development of MSL; and finally, the concept of social class, both of multinational Soviet writers and of their novels’ characters. The book's main argument is developed through its chronological structure: from a vehicle for imagining the community of the multinational Soviet Union, into which it was rather repressively institutionalized in the 1930s, during perestroika, MSL and its authors became major forces in the Soviet collapse.