Global Russian Cultures, edited by Kevin M.F. Platt, forms part of a wave of scholarly works seeking to place Russia in its global or transnational context. These include Russian Culture in the Age of Globalization (ed. Vlad Strukov and Sarah Hudspith, 2019), Transnational Russian Studies (ed. Andy Byford, Connor Doak, and Stephen Hutchings, 2020), and Vera Michlin-Shapir's Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era (2021). Each of these volumes offer a different focus, but they are united in their departure from a methodological nationalism that insists on a unitary relationship between territory, language, and culture, and the exceptionalism that often accompanies such an approach. The transnational turn re-envisions Russian cultures as plural, spilling across national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. It is, in part, a response to global political trends in the late 2010s: the rise of an inward-looking nationalism in the west—the Trump Presidency; Brexit—and to Russia's bullish expansionism, signaled both by soft power initiatives (the Russian World) and military intervention, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and, most strikingly, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Platt is frank about the volume's political commitment: “Our work stands in opposition to the bounded and unitary conceptions of culture and identity that are most often associated with national projects in and around Russia. “In an era when some would build walls around ostensibly distinct cultures and societies and their own ‘primordial’ territories, we insist that cultures are always plural, unbounded, and polycentric” (9).
The volume is divided into two parts, each consisting of seven chapters. The first part, “The Situation of Russian Cultures,” focuses on the development of Russian cultures in different parts of the world, including the Baltics, Central Asia, Israel, Ukraine, and the United States, whereas the second, “Russian Cultures at Large,” is thematic in focus, covering areas such as Russian state policy, gender, music, and tourism. The quality of the scholarship is uniformly excellent, but space only permits me to discuss selected chapters here. For this reader, the strongest contributions were those that meditated on conceptual and methodological questions at length alongside particular case studies. For example, Maria Rubins advocates a new way of envisioning Russian cultures: “[a] polycentric, nonhierarchical model of global Russian cultures [that] may be visualized as an archipelago, a chain of islands that appear independent and isolated but in fact are interconnected in space, as well as time” (24). Rubins then illustrates how this model might work in practice through three case studies, one focused on interwar Paris, one on New York during the Cold War era, and one based on the Russophone community in contemporary Israel. Vitaly Chernetsky's chapter on Russophone writing in Ukraine predates the 2022 invasion, but offers a valuable historical perspective and handles with sensitivity how the post-2014 conflict has thrown questions of language and identity into relief in Ukraine. Ukraine also figures prominently in Dirk Uffelmann's thoughtful chapter that critically unpacks the Putinist construction of “Russophobia” in relation to anti-Russian statements made in the Russian language, and the performative contradictions therein.
While most of the chapters focus on Russian culture outside Russia, Ilya Kukulin's fascinating chapter looks at how “the image of Russia's “territorial integrity” has been made and unmade over time” (152) in Russian literature. Kukulin demonstrates particularly “how equivocation between imperial and national identification had far-reaching implications at the level of the territorial imagination” (156). His wide-ranging analysis stretches from to the eighteenth-century odic tradition to the present day, covering writers as diverse as Nikolai Nekrasov, Vasilii Aksenov, and Vladimir Sorokin. He concludes with an interpretation of contemporary writer Denis Osokin, finding that his works offer an alternative projection of Russian territory that is “centrifugal, but not expansionist, directed toward attention to the cultural models of the peripheries that subvert authoritative (‘central’) norms” (180). While Kukulin's study impresses in its breadth of coverage, Adrian Wanner offers a fascinating portrait of one individual, the Russian-American screenwriter Michael Idov, as an example of the consummate “global Russian” (230) who “bounc[es] back and forth between continents and languages” (231). Wanner offers a sharp analysis of how Idov's “transcultural self-fashioning” (232) switches based on whether he is addressing a Russian or American audience, noting how he transcends typical conceptions of the immigrant writer and yet remains implicated in systems of global capitalism. However, Wanner concludes with a prophetic warning that Russia's growing nationalism may soon obstruct this vision of global Russianness, suggesting it “may ultimately be revealed as the utopian project of a brief historical interlude” (248). Indeed, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Idov penned an editorial vowing: “[a]s long as Vladimir Putin remains in power, I will not write in Russian any more” (Idov in Vanity Fair, 2022). He went on to lament the failure of his attempts to build bridges between Russia and the west through his creative work: “I thought I'd built a bridge. But when they're sending tanks over it, it's easier to burn it and start again elsewhere” (Idov in Vanity Fair, 2022).
Reading Global Russian Cultures now, one is often struck by a sense of melancholy: while the volume often cautions against the kind of aggressive nationalism that underlies the Ukraine War, much has already changed irrevocably. Lara Ryazanova-Clarke's illuminating chapter, which examines Russian tourist discourse through a case study of Russian visitors to Scotland, already seems to belong to another world where a much greater degree of mobility between Russia and the west was possible. Miriam Finkelstein's chapter, which closes the book, offers particular food for thought as she examines the legacy of Russian culture abroad, looking at how writers with no familial or linguistic link to Russia—Bernardo Carvalho, Bora Ćosić, and Orhan Pamuk, among others—nevertheless engage with “Russianness as a metaphor and a performance” (319), seeking to inscribe themselves into the Russian tradition. Finkelstein concludes that one meaning of being a “Russian” author in this sense is to “resis[t] oppressive regimes and remin[d] the public of the victims of persecution, in any given national context, through the power of literature itself,” “to give a voice to the victims of violence and terror,” “to speak of and for those who would otherwise remain silent and forgotten” (328). Since Finkelstein wrote these words, the dominant conception of “Russianness” in the world has likely altered. Finkelstein's positive vision of Russian culture may be incomplete, but she does remind us that there is a powerful counter-current in Russian literature, even if it has been drowned out in the current political moment.
