“Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry: Wartime and Poetic Time” raises questions about the significance of new technology, new media, and the concept of “real time” by showing how poetry, even the new forms of poetic reportage coming out of present-day Ukraine, makes its own time.

Social Media did not invent poetry. But in some ways, it reinvented it. Much like the explosion of small journals in the modernist period, social media platforms have created interconnected networks of writers who share their own and others’ work, in real time, sometimes writing poems directly onto their Facebook pages or in the comment thread. This article introduces the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Archive, an interactive web platform, which catalogues Ukrainian poems posted to Facebook since 2013. The roughly 100 poets featured in this archive were either born in Ukraine or moved to Ukraine before 2014. The archive is multilingual, and organized by poet, theme, and language. It is also searchable by text string. This growing web resource enables and encourages scholars to engage with contemporary writing shared to social media.

This paper explores the relationship between elegy, national mourning, and the poetics of public grief by taking as an example Jaroslav Seifert's sequence of elegies, Osm dní (Eight Days), published in 1937 to mourn the death of Czechoslovakia's first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937). An extraordinary work of poetry—exceptional both in its ambition and in the apparent speed with which it was composed and published—Seifert's Eight Days has largely been forgotten today and remains little known outside of Czech literary criticism. This article offers a reading of the sequence as a modernist elegy, with the purpose of rethinking the multidirectional relationship between poetry, nationalism and public mourning.

This essay suggests that there are three crucial contexts that have been overlooked in the scholarship on Andrei Zviagintsev's film, Leviathan. First, there is the ecclesiastical history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the years following the election of Kirill (Gundiaev) as Patriarch of Moscow in 2009. The article demonstrates that Zviagintsev was keenly aware of Kirill's growing partnership with the Putin regime and that he was especially dismayed by the patriarch's response to the Bolotnaia protests and Pussy Riot affair. The second context is more theological and considerably lesser known. It concerns the notion of the church's “dark double”, a concept developed in the mid-twentieth century by an obscure Gulag survivor and lay theologian named Sergei Fudel΄. My main contention in the essay is that Fudel΄'s conception of the “dark double” is the foundational theological idea in Leviathan—the idea that structures and underpins all of the film's religious scenes. Finally, the third context recovered is the religious thinking of Andrei Zviagintsev himself. For it turns out that the celebrated auteur director is comfortable discussing not only scriptwriting or cinematography. He also has much to say, both onscreen and off, about the clerics and faithful of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church.

Abstract

This article examines Yugoslav women's transnational memories of state terror in two autobiographical texts bearing witness to the Holocaust and corrective labor camps on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur: Ženi Lebl's White Violets (1990) and Eva Israel Grlić's Memories (1997). I argue these texts recover disparate histories of state terror, coproducing shared strategies of memory and narration in the process. This article contextualizes how women's testimonies maneuvered the patriarchal cult of silence that marginalized gendered experiences of the corrective labor camps until the 1990s and women's erasure from Yugoslavia's important legacies, such as the antifascist struggle within which Ženi Lebl and Eva Grlić were actively involved. Drawing attention to how the Yugoslav state terror apparatus negated the women's revolutionary contributions and weaponized their biographies against them, this article argues that life writing reclaims their authorial agency and restores multilayered archives of the past.

In this essay, Rory Finnin reviews the interventions of poetry in Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine and argues for more intellectual engagement with the concept of Russian genocide in the field of Slavic studies.

Soviet citizens perusing their daily copies of Pravda or Izvestiia on May 23, 1934, would have come across an essay by the famous writer Maksim Gor΄kii with an unusual title: “Proletarskii gumanizm” (Proletarian Humanism). Perhaps intrigued by this funny sounding but clearly important foreign word, inquisitive readers might have turned to the recently published first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE), which provides two entries for humanism: one referring to “a conventional but not sufficiently precise term used to characterize the culture of the Renaissance epoch, or some aspect thereof,” and a second, much shorter entry concerning “a modern movement in the theory of knowledge that arose in the early twentieth century in connection to pragmatism.” Neither entry makes any mention of proletarian, socialist, or Soviet varieties of humanism. Indeed, according to the BSE, Renaissance humanism inevitably “exhausts its progressive possibilities, degenerates, and becomes a conservative and reactionary force,” remaining “alien to the broad masses and even a significant part of the bourgeoisie.”

“The world of today is torn asunder by a great dispute,” the Polish author Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1951. On one side lay the east, “under the domination of Moscow,” and on the other the west, encompassing the rest of the globe. “Trampled down by History—that elephant,” Poles found themselves sequestered in the east. Unless, like Miłosz, they had somehow “escaped” to the west, they were doomed to live “behind the iron curtain” in a “hermetically sealed . . . Eastern world.” Thanks partly to Miłosz's influence, this Cold War vision of a bifurcated world has thoroughly shaped scholarship on postwar Poland and the rest of eastern Europe. In recent years, however, it has been increasingly contested. Historians no longer speak of “parting” or “raising” the Iron Curtain but rather see this boundary as “nylon,” “airy,” and “porous.” They have uncovered an array of east-west ties as well as linkages along a different axis, north to south. These works belie the old idea of a “hermetically sealed . . . Eastern world” and also restore agency to its inhabitants. No longer “trampled down by history,” Poles now appear as “global citizens” who could “be part of the larger world and transcend the Cold War divide.” And yet one key way of transcending this divide still remains largely overlooked. While scholars explore points of contact between blocs in a “world . . . torn asunder,” they have been less attentive to the institutions that bound that world together: international organizations.

Orphanhood in Tolstoy has largely escaped critical examination, in part because though the writer himself was an orphan, his texts say little about the topic explicitly. But in fact thinking about orphans' trauma is everywhere in the pre-crisis fiction. Tolstoy draws orphans and non-orphans as fundamentally morally different. All his major protagonists are orphans and want to marry non-orphans. Further, many of his novelistic tics, and many critical insights into Tolstoy generally, actually apply only to characters who are motherless. War and Peace and Anna Karenina can be read as the author's running debate with himself: is an escape available for the traumatized from their pain later in life? If so, it would mean life is good and God is kind. Both books answer yes and demand orphans renounce their permanent sense of grievance against life for their losses. But in their final scenes Tolstoy confesses his optimism was false; life is not fair, and psyches damaged by orphanhood can never fully recover.

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia, ChGK) was founded on November 2, 1942. From the outset, photography and eyewitnesses were vital resources for conveying the horrors of the German occupation. Refuting accusations that the USSR was responsible for massacring Polish prisoners of war in Katyn forest further magnified the importance of generating an irrefutable record of Nazi guilt. This article examines the efforts of Stalin's government to bury the Katyn lie beneath images of genuine victims of Hitler's regime. Tracing the diverse origins of the ChGK's photographs and supporting testimony brings into focus the reasons why wartime observers found the Soviet falsification convincing. ChGK materials should be approached as artifacts of mass mobilization. By disentangling these pictures and pages from their propagandistic uses, researchers can move closer to understanding the symbiotic relationship between official narratives and personal truths in the USSR as well as the post-Soviet Russian Federation.

Drawing on the classic question of feminist art history, this article asks how and by whom the contemporary canon of Czech art history was constructed, and when the exclusion of women artists of the 1980s generation from it took place. It shows that the 1960s generation of women artists emerged from the disruption of the traditional gender order in the Stalinist era. In contrast, the generation of women artists who entered the art scene in the 1980s was disadvantaged by the declining power of art institutional structures and the growing importance of informal networks for career success in late socialism. Their lack of social capital, combined with the re-emergence of macho culture in the 1980s art scene, the persistence of traditional gender roles in the home, and the loss of more substantial state support for artistic production after 1989, led to their “invisible” role in the post-1989 art world.

The Soviet physiologist Lina Solomonovna Shtern (1875—1968) was the only defendant in the trial against the Jewish Antifascist Committee who was not sentenced to death; the circumstances surrounding the court’s leniency toward her have long remained unknown. Shtern was sentenced to five years in exile and even her belongings were not confiscated. Her story has become the stuff of legends and much speculation. My paper reconstructs the particular circumstances surrounding the court’s decision to give Shtern a more lenient sentence and considers how the politics of science in the late 1940s and early 1950s could have influenced this decision and helped Shtern elaborate her own strategy of survival. I argue that the main reason for sparing Shtern’s life was her essay “On Cancer” written in the prison cell in the late 1951—early 1952. My work is based on a careful analysis of documents from Shtern’s personal archive and of the context of Soviet and North American medicine.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been roundly condemned in the West. NATO members have continued to supply Ukraine with weaponry while the EU, US and their allies have ensured that the Russian economy remains under the most extensive and intensive set of sanctions in history. Yet many leaders of countries in the global south have been far more hesitant to condemn Russian actions. Some have merely abstained in United Nations resolutions criticizing Russia, while others have remained neutral. This paper will endeavor to explain why the global south has such a different perspective from the global north on Russia’s war in Ukraine. I argue that this is a result of America’s withdrawal from the global south over the last two decades and Russia’s reemergence in many parts of the Middle East, Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia.

This article examines how sexual health became an important component of ideal military masculinity in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Rising rates of venereal diseases (VD) in the military in the final years of the nineteenth century forced the Russian imperial state to increasingly turn their attention to the sexual health and hygienic habits of military personnel. State officials enlisted the help of military physicians, who prepared sex education brochures and lectures with the aim of reducing venereal infection. Sex education materials encouraged conscripts to abandon the habits and practices of rural life and embrace “modern” hygienic manhood. Physicians saw military personnel as an important link to the Empire’s vast lower-class population and regarded the inculcation of new norms of health and hygiene within military populations as a key method for improving public health more generally, especially in the countryside. Within this context, expert knowledge became intertwined with visions of ideal military masculinity, and good sexual health and hygiene were presented as important markers of manhood.

Marxists have long argued about the viability of “market socialism.” That model was dominant among professional economists in the Polish People’s Republic after the fall of Stalinism in 1956, even though they were never able to fully implement its principles. This article explores the debates over this concept in communist Poland, identifying the central issue as an attempt to combine socialist goals with neoclassical methodological principles and theoretical assumptions, particularly regarding price formation. Advocates of central planning always claimed that this mixture was unsustainable, destined to slide towards a restoration of capitalism. They were probably right.

The article examines Tomasz Różycki’s 2004 mock epic Twelve Stations. The poem recounts an oneiric tale about a community of expatriates from Poland’s Eastern Borderlands who send their grandson on a mission to assemble a scattered family and guide it to their lost homeland in today’s Ukraine. Revolving around the issues of memory, post-memory, and nostalgia, Twelve Stations draws heavily from the adventure tradition to present a fresh perspective on modern Poland’s founding myths: the loss of Borderlands and settling the post-German territories in the West. Reading the poem in the context of cultural memory studies and focusing on the author’s deployment of adventure tropes and patterns, the article argues that Różycki’s poetic tale de-politicizes the existing narratives affixed to forced resettlements by weaving them with various strands of popular romance. In doing so, the poem imagines a collective act of “working through” the trans-generational trauma resulting from physical and cultural uprooting. Różycki’s inventive use of the form demonstrates that adventure narratives can be effective vessels of cultural memory, capable of repurposing elements of official narratives and nostalgic imagination to initiate more constructive and future-oriented identity-building processes.

In the first post-war decade, Stalinist authorities resumed pre-war practices of voluntary gatherings of store patrons in large cities. Such meetings, called “consumer conferences,” constituted embryonic manifestations of proletarian governance that municipal officials considered ideologically safe to employ in a period when Kremlin elites increased their crackdown measures against the wartime liberalization initiatives. Drawing on people's insider knowledge of local communities, city authorities aimed to gather economic information about consumer needs to improve the retail system. Yet, urban working-class women, the most committed conference participants, saw stores more than as simply places of consumption: the store contributed to the local community's safety, hygiene, health, emotional comfort, and mutual trust. Consumer conferences therefore turned into a forum for women's activism as female urbanites used customer gatherings to carve out part of a state-curated public space in which they exercised a measure of control over their neighborhoods’ well-being.

A lot happens when we press play. To prepare, we select a particular format of sound storage—maybe vinyl, magnetic tape, polyethylene, or an mp3—for the parsing, processing, and amplification of that format's content. Once things start moving, we inaugurate a listening experience that may seem effortless, but which has undergone meticulous social conditioning, and which is informed by our own deep histories of listening, aurality, and attention. In the long term, this process is not as rigid as it sounds: listening has always been flexible, and historians of the concert hall have told us a twisting and turning story about audiences who did not always think it was proper to stay silent, and who did not always feel the need to pay much attention to what took place in front of them. But today, anyone who chooses to play a spoken word compilation instead of a jazz LP (long-playing record) at a cocktail party might not find such a receptive crowd. Facilitated by internet streaming and downloading, this relatively new ability to amass intensely personal sonic archives often clashes with the contextual demands of where, when, and how certain forms of listening are meant to be enacted: the cocktail party often dictates a particular aural accompaniment, one more amenable to music than an audiobook. For such a widely practiced activity, why do the modern activities of storing, distributing, and amplifying sound, which have grown kaleidoscopically complex in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, remain undertheorized in Slavic studies? What would it mean to think about these questions and their repercussions in east European modernity? And what might listening to east European history and culture tell us that our other senses cannot?

The papers in this cluster—and sound studies more broadly—attune our ears to hearing and listening, to paying attention to that “other” important sense of modernity: the aural or sonic that so often is asked to play second fiddle to the visual. The challenge of sound studies, Jonathan Sterne reminds us, “is to think across sounds, to consider sonic phenomena in relationship to one another—as types of sonic phenomena rather than as things-in-themselves—whether they be music, voices, listening, media, buildings, performances, or another other path into sonic life.”

This article examines audio-visual discontinuity in Ognjen Glavonić's 2015 documentary Depth 2 and argues that this approach to sound and screen allows the audience to engage with the difficult topic of war crimes in a novel manner in order to address a failure in cultural memory in Serbian society. The documentary explores war crimes committed against Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian state forces and paramilitaries in the spring of 1999. Depth 2 cinematically recontextualizes recorded testimonies of both survivors and perpetrators from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), defamiliarizing the archive by anonymizing the source material and by removing the synchrony between voice and image. The lack of concordance between voice and screen is a key aesthetic strategy through which the film comments on pressing ethical, political, and historical issues in Serbian society.