The cultural myth of the provinces provides the contemporary cultural elite with a semiotic apparatus for formulating Russia's new, postimperial identity. Today, cultural production locates true Russianness outside newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow. In mass culture, the traditional privileging of the center over the backward provinces gives way to the view of the provinces as a repository of national tradition and moral strength. Conversely, high literature and art-house films provide an alternative, harshly critical image of them. In both cases, a particular concept of Russianness is negotiated, one in which the provinces play a central role. Ultimately, both redirect nationalist discourse away from the deeply unsatisfying model of Russia versus the west and instead offer a hermetic national identity based on an “us versus us,” rather than “us versus them,” model.

This article analyzes the Serbian fake news site Njuz.net, exploring the dynamics of its production, consumption, and appropriation in Serbian postsocialist, pre-EU-accession society. The increasing presence and importance of parodic media genres and the embrace of satire as a viable way to interpret and deal with social and political reality are explained in terms of both Serbia's historical trajectory and its media landscape as well as the global neo-liberal condition. Njuz.net's parody sheds critical light on various political, public, and social subjects simultaneously. Its satire communicates with multiple audiences and enables identification and detachment on several levels, a fact that makes the effects of this parody difficult to judge. The dilemmas that its writers face regarding their social activism are, I argue, a symptom of wider social anxieties and structural adversities caused by the difficulty of clearly identifying and detaching from “the enemy.” Because of how labor, consumption, and everyday practices are organized, we all inevitably contribute to the maintenance of that enemy's well-being. Seen in this light, parody is not only a form of social criticism but also a self-reflective practice.

In the late 1950s, the Moscow branch of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf embarked on an ambitious program to build a network of social and residential buildings for deaf people in the city. In this article, I examine the resulting emergence of a defined “deaf space” within the Moscow cityscape, exploring the ways in which this space shaped, and was shaped by, the Soviet deaf community. While such institutional buildings were intended as the ultimate expression of deaf agency, drawing on revolutionary understandings of disability to define the deaf as active Soviet citizens, they also served to frame the deaf as visibly “other,” inviting contradictory and often problematic readings of the deaf community's place within the Soviet body politic. By examining deaf people's engagement with the developing politics of Soviet urban space, I thus explore issues of disability, Sovietness, and the complex intersection of marginality and emancipation in the late Soviet era.

In this article, I use the transcripts of interviews carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Scientific Atheism in the mid-sixties. Informants were asked about diverse aspects of their religious practice and belief, allowing scholars—both then and now—to consider the nature of Soviet “secularization.” Following Charles Taylor, I suggest that this was not simply “a story of loss, of subtraction”; instead, informants’ rather heterodox conceptions of the afterlife indicate moments of individual creativity. In particular, I find that among the poor and marginalized, visions of the afterlife sometimes articulated a desire for social equality considered missing from Soviet society. I also probe the Soviet state’s problematic dependency on atheism. The regime’s legitimacy rested on its claim to ensure progress and modernity, and religion— the epitome of backwardness—was a useful antithesis. The interview was a ritual that enacted the superiority of Soviet values (reason, rationality, and enlightenment). And yet the encounter between atheist-interviewer and “believer” could often prove unpredictable, suggesting that the religion-atheism binary was in practice rather more brittle than the authorities might have hoped.

This article addresses the aesthetic history and banning of Abram Room's Strogii iunosha (A strict young man, 1936) in the context of the 1936 campaign against formalism and naturalism in Soviet art. I show that the film's experimental style was not the cause of its banning and argue that the antiformalism campaign was a political rather than aesthetic event. What the campaign demanded was a shift in mode, from form centered to theme centered, and it was this disruptive shift that rendered Soviet cinema unproductive after 1936.

This article explores the image of the khalat, or dressing gown, in and around Petr Viazemskii's 1817 poem “Proshchanie s khalatom” (Farewell to My Dressing Gown). As the poem circulated during the period between its creation and printing, its central image—the khalat—became enshrined as a symbol for early nineteenth-century literary culture around and within the Arzamas circle, emphasizing a creative inner life and an informal approach to writing. The poem mediates between friendship, honor, authenticity, and authorship and the formalities, duties, and expectations of society life. The khalat image appears in later poems, correspondence, and occasional writings by Anton Del'vig, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Vasilii Zhukovskii, among others. Tracing the image through its intertextual influences, extratextual impact, and memetic evolution, I examine the way it contributed to the development of an intellectual network through information transfer during the early nineteenth century and beyond.

The Soviet 1920s and '30s saw heated debate around the issue of laughter, with writers and political actors alike asking, should the Soviet person laugh at all, and if so, how? This article considers the birth of Soviet laughter as reflected in Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov's popular satirical novels, The Twelve Chairs (1928) and The Golden Calf (1931). I argue that Il'f and Petrov's relatively consistent critical unassailability throughout the Soviet period rests on two techniques. First, they acknowledge trauma without dwelling on it—it is always already in the past, with dramatic focus placed instead on the socialist future. Second, they encourage collective, outward-oriented laughter, stimulating Soviet citizens to unite themselves against the possible enemies of socialism. Thus, despite its inclusion of some subversive elements (like the ideologically volatile trickster Ostap Bender), Il'f and Petrov's satire was at the vanguard of what became official literary ideology.

Ever since the accident that destroyed unit 4 of the Chernobyl’ Nuclear Power Plant on April 26,1986, became public knowledge, the Soviet government's response to this catastrophe has been the subject of bewilderment and withering criticism. The exact sequence of events that unfolded in the days following the disaster and the forces that shaped it have, however, remained obscure. While the USSR's civil defense organization urged prompt and decisive measures to inform the population of the accident and move people out of harm's way, other Soviet institutions, such as the Communist Party and the KGB, feared the accident's threat to their legitimacy more than its implications for public health. Drawing on declassified archival documents from Ukrainian archives and memoir literature, I explore the political and institutional logic that prevented the USSR from acting appropriately to protect citizens from the consequences of the nuclear accident.

This article explores narratives surrounding child soldiers in Poland, with a particular focus on the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. My discussion examines a variety of contexts in which this figure appears, such as urban spaces, press debates, popular literature, and educational games, and unpacks the taboos associated with cultural constructions of childhood. The article points to the complex interaction between the enduring narratives of resistance and the struggle for independence which characterize Poland and the international humanitarian discourse on the use of children in war which goes beyond the local context. More generally, I show that the representations of Warsaw's young insurgents speak less of the children and their rights and more of contemporary notions of Polish national identity, the nation's wished-for or projected development, and collective hopes and fears in the wake of its accession to the European Union.

This article examines literature in Russia, as opposed to Russian literature, through the window of Tat'iana's reading, especially two novels by Sophie Cottin, in Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. A quantitative, sociological approach to European markets for novels shows that Russians and Europeans were reading the same popular French, German, and English sentimental novels by August von Kotzebue; Stéphanie-Félicité, comtesse de Genlis; August Lafontaine; and Cottin. Pushkin, however, positioned himself in the Russian literary field with the canonical novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, and Madame de Stael, against the "mediocre" novels of Cottin. Nevertheless, in his ongoing efforts to write Russian novels, Pushkin covertly engaged with popular sentimental novels to integrate their conservative emphasis on duty, virtue, and love with Russian noble life. I argue that a likely intertext for the eponymous heroine of The Captain's Daughter was Cottin's European bestseller Élisabeth, ou Les exilés de Sibérie (1806).

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the construction and naturalization of many unitary ethnolinguistic categories that would serve diverse ends within the Russian and Soviet states. This article combines disciplinary perspectives from linguistic anthropology and history to excavate the local history of one such category–the Buriat language. We trace the category's origin in the grammars, translations, and correspondence of its first Russian proponents, Russian Orthodox missionary linguists working in the area around Lake Baikal, and its subsequent uptake by Buriat nationalists and Soviet linguists. We show that the missionaries and their religious motivations played a significant role in the construction of ethnolinguistic categories and that these ethnolinguistic categories were not, as is often thought, predominantly imposed by the center onto distant peripheries. Attending to Orthodox missionaries’ linguistic work in the Baikal region reveals the more complex local workings of colonial power.

Taking its cue from Lev Tolstoi's claim, in “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace,” that the Russian novel is a “deviation from European form,” this article investigates deviance as a formal and thematic aspect of the Russian novel. Concentrating on Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook as an early exemplar of the Russian novel form, and locating its deviance against the backdrop of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (the English novel with which it is most frequently paired), I examine both formal matters and the texts' thematic and imaginative clusters. These questions of commercialism, capital, and the role of money; of gender difference, the regulation of sexuality and pleasure, and bodily life generally; of Oedipal family arrangements and communal organization; and of repetition and the production of the new are especially at stake in investigating issues of normativity and abnormality, or regularity and deformity, as they are given shape in the works. In particular, this article concentrates on the police as a multivalent literary, and particularly novelistic, construct to present the Russian novel as a distinctively unpoliced and unregulated genre whose lawlessness is brought into relief by the culture of discipline and legality that pervades Defoe's work.

In The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz delineates a startling vision of his hometown of Drohobycz as a space governed by second-hand cast-offs of metropolitan modernity and posits the artist as a demiurge who reigns over an accumulation of matter. Seeking escape from the shabbiness and tedium of daily life, the narrator plunges into an imaginary zone of his own making, one marked by temporal distortion, spatial instability, and the superabundance of matter, trash in particular. In the province, trash—as well as other "trashy" objects (tandeta and Bylejakość)—can be put to novel creative uses. It is thus possible to speak of a poetics of trash, wherein civilizational detritus returns to the foreground as a productive mode of representation and of micropolitical resistance. It is reterritorialized in Schulz as an archive of individual longings and desires and an index of local achievement. Trash, then, both as physical tandeta and as a key component of dream-work, emerges as a unifying sign of Schulz's provincial poetics.

This article discusses Viktor Shklovskii's exilic narratives of the early 1920s, Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922, and Zoo, or Letters Not about Love. I suggest that in these texts, published in Berlin shortly after the show trial against the right Socialist Revolutionariès, Shklovskii casts himself as a "sentimental hero," evoking sympathy for the narrator's plight by mobilizing some of the devices of the sentimental novel but also struggling with the implications of this sentimentalism. The article outlines Shklovskii's attempts to prove his political reliability during his exile, juxtaposing his private correspondence with his memoirs, and argues for a more nuanced interpretation of Shklovskii's political biography through the prism of the history of emotions.