ABOUT THIS BOOK

A cross-disciplinary study on Russian diaspora writing.

Since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe—but what happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon, and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries? This volume sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, world literature, and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence, and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes, and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Maria Rubins is a translator and professor of Russian and comparative literature at University College London. Her books include Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures, and Russian Montparnasse.

REVIEWS

‘Ranging across geographies and genres, a constellation of the world’s leading scholars of Russian culture rethink the nature of the canon, challenge durable myths and archetypes, and upend previously hierarchical relationships between supposed centres and peripheries.’ – Philip Ross Bullock, University of Oxford

‘The consistently stimulating and erudite chapters enter into fruitful dialogue with contemporary theories of diaspora and globalization, indicating both points of concurrence as well as ways that the Russian experience diverges. An excellent and necessary book.’ – Edythe Haber, Harvard University

‘Exile or diaspora? Russians or russophones? Hyphenated or post-colonial? This fascinating volume gathers together top specialists to discuss the critical questions that have emerged in Russian literary studies. It will prove to be foundational for the study of the new, de-centered Russian literature of the twenty-first century.’ – J. Douglas Clayton, University of Ottawa

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Notes on contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements

Part one: Conceptual territories of ‘diaspora’: introduction
1. The unbearable lightness of being a diasporian: modes of writing and reading narratives of displacement
Maria Rubins

Part two: ‘Quest for significance’: performing diasporic Identities in transnational contexts
2. Exile as emotional, moral and ideological ambivalence: Nikolai Turgenev and the performance of political exile
Andreas Schonle
3. Rewriting the Russian literary tradition of prophecy in the diaspora: Bunin, Nabokov and Viacheslav Ivanov
Pamela Davidson

Part three: Evolutionary trajectories: adaptation, ‘Interbreeding’ and transcultural polyglossya
4. Translingual poetry and the boundaries of diaspora: the self-translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky
Adrian Wanner
5. Evolutionary biology and ‘writing the diaspora’: the cases of Theodosius Dobzhansky and Vladimir Nabokov
David Bethea

Part four: Imagined spaces of unity and difference
6. Repatriation of diasporic literature and the role of the poetry anthology in the construction of a diasporic canon
Katharine Hodgson
7. Is there room for diaspora literature in the internet age?
Mark Lipovetsky
8. The benefits of distance: extraterritoriality as cultural capital in the literary marketplace
Kevin M. F. Platt

Beyond diaspora? Brief remarks in lieu of an afterword
Galin Tihanov
Conclusion
Maria Rubins

Index