While working on the state of the field essays for this issue, we were challenged to balance our editorial interference with the need to retain the content and stylistic idiosyncrasies of the authors. We hope that our readership will keep this in mind while exploring this section. At the suggestion of the AATSEEL Executive Council, we began soliciting essays on the state of the field from colleagues in various countries and continents. We gave no specific guidelines or parameters, and the authors had considerable latitude in the way they structured the content of their essays. The first of these texts were published in the past two issues of SEEJ (63.3, Fall 2019 and 63.4, Winter 2019). Four additional texts appear in this issue. We recognize that despite their varied format, they all offer a wealth of information on the status and recent developments of our field around the world. To us, some of these present exciting shifts, and others raise concerns, but we do hope that readers find all of these essays useful. They focus on the history and/or the current state of the field in specific countries and regions. Some highlight the contributions of individuals and others describe institutional academic structures; still others muse on our area of study as an approach or methodology. We invite colleagues to write to us with brief comments on the published pieces or contribute similar reports. We plan to continue the forum as long as it generates productive information and debate.

This article considers two fundamental works in Vladimir Sharov’s corpus in terms of their construction and narrative technique. It is concerned above all with addressing a question previously raised by Mark Lipovetsky: how does Sharov manage to offer the reader both immersion in the traumatic past and the critical distance from which to reflect on it? The main contention of the article is that The Rehearsals and Before & During both model a movement from density and difficulty to lucidity (only to then return the reader to the initial complexity). The convolutions of content and narrative organization that disorientate readers of Sharov have as their unacknowledged counterweight a search for clarity that is being conducted at the level of language, style and metaphor. Moreover, this duality of complexity and lucidity is intimately linked to the thematic oppositions that are sustained and never resolved in Sharov’s fiction, notably that between good and evil. A mise-en-abyme of these processes is identified in a discrete section of Before and During, which is analysed here before the main contention is tested against the two novels as a whole, with particular reference to the distinctive features of Sharov’s handling of plot, pace and language.

Как Сделаны Романы Шарова: «Репетиции» и «До и во время»

Оливер Реди

Как указал Марк Липовецкий, Шаров «создает странный гибрид между разыгрыванием и проработкой исторической травмы». Отличительное и парадоксальное качество его романов состоит в том, чтобы позволить читателям заново пережить травму, и одновременно сохранять необходимое расстояние, с которого можно наблюдать эту травму и трагедию. Цель этой статьи – изучать, как два из важнейших романов Шарова («Репетиции» и «До и во время») добиваются этого мощного эффекта. В статье развивается тезис, что романы Шарова строятся на контрасте плотности и сложности, с одной стороны, и ясности и даже прозрачности, с другой, а параллельно, на контрасте между замедлением и ускорением повествования. Прихотливость содержания и нарратива противостоит, пусть и неочевидно, поиску ясности, который ведется в тех же самых текстах на уровне языка, стиля и метафоры. Более того, этот структурообразующий, как с точки зрения темы, так и формы, контраст актуализирует многие взаимозависимые тематические оппозиции, которые поддерживаются, но никогда не разрешаются в произведениях Владимира Шарова.

Oliver Ready is Research Fellow in Russian Literature and Culture at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a translator of contemporary and classic Russian prose. He is the author of Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013 (Peter Lang, 2017), while his translations include Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics, 2014), the “essential” short stories of Gogol (And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon, Pushkin Press, 2019), and two novels by Vladimir Sharov: Before & During and The Rehearsals, both published by Dedalus. He is currently working on a short biography of Gogol and a third novel by Sharov (Be as Little Children).

A notable figure in the Russian literary landscape since the scandalous publication of his second novel, Do i vo vremya (Before & During) in Novyi mir in 1993, Vladimir Sharov has recently become the focus of renewed critical attention. Here, a growing body of scholarship has tended to revolve around two interconnected themes: his contribution to the evolution of the post-Soviet literary field; and relationship between his fictional works and the writing (and re-writing) of Russian history. Yet a recurrent emphasis on Sharov’s historicism has meant that other elements of his approach to the novel have gone unobserved. This is particularly the case when it comes to his relationship to and treatment of the specifically literary legacy of the past, as opposed to Russian history itself. In keeping with many Russian-language writers of the last few decades, Sharov proves to be particularly fascinated with both the literary process itself, and the complex ways in which the Russian literary tradition has been received, and his intertextual dialogue with the literature of past proves to be a crucial facet of his strategy for dealing with Soviet history. This article explores Sharov’s sympathy for, debt to, interest in, and intertextual borrowings from the works of Andrei Platonov (1899-1951), arguing in particular that Sharov’s novel, The Rehearsals (Repetitsii), is motivated by a profound engagement with the legacy of the early Soviet avant-garde. Moreover, Sharov’s dialogue with Platonov does not simply reach back directly to the 1920s and early 1930s, the period of Platonov’s most celebrated and significant activity as a writer, but is instead mediated by the slow rediscovery—both official and unofficial—of Platonov’s oeuvre in the late- and post-Soviet periods.

Начало, окончания, и вечное возвращение: Владимир Шаров, Андрей Платонов и наследие советского авангарда

Филипп Росс Буллок

В данной статье рассматривается интерес Владимира Шарова к творчеству Андрея Платонова, как одного из ведущих представителей эстетичеких и идеологичеcких принципов советского авангарда. Приводятся цитаты из трех статей, написанных Шаровым с 2000 года по 2018 год и излагающих основы его толкования литературного наследия Платонова. Затем следует опыт прочтения романа “Репетиции”, в котором устанавливается целый ряд интертекстуальных реминисценций из разных произведений Платонова. Хотя Шарову была чужда вера Платонова в коммунизм, его произведения служат ему своего рода комментариями к русской истории.

Philip Ross Bullock is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College, and Director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). His publications include The Feminine in the Prose of Andrey Platonov (2005), Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England (2009), The Correspondence of Jean Sibelius and Rosa Newmarch, 1906–1939 (2011), and most recently, Pyotr Tchaikovsky (2016).

In this article, I propose a new model for interpreting Aleksei Kruchenykh's zaum' based on its description as “zero” by the poet in numerous texts from the late 1910s. Kruchenykh's writings on zero have traditionally been read in the context of those of Kazimir Malevich, whose Suprematist zero is one of the best-known theories of the Russian Avant-Garde. However, a closer examination reveals that Kruchenykh's turn to zero did not reflect a shift to Malevich's understanding of art. On the contrary, his zero continued the aesthetic explorations that initially inspired Malevich to create his famous “null-text,” the Black Square (1915), and it was in many ways at odds with the fundamental principles of Suprematism. In analyzing Kruchenykh's works from the late 1910s, I will demonstrate that his theory of zero represents a highly original and significant contribution to the culture of the Russian Avant-Garde in its own right.

Крученых и нулевая точка русского модернизма

Джейсон Страдлер

В конце 1910-х годов поэт-футурист Алексей Крученых написал ряд художественных и теоретических работ, в которых он связывал эстетику зауми с числом ноль и с понятием нулевой точки. Свидетельством важности ноля для того периода в творчестве Крученых служит ремарка поэта Игоря Терентьева 1918 года, что поэзия Крученых является «великим ничтожеством, абсолютным нулем». Если тема ноля стала традиционной для обсуждения творчества художника Казимира Малевича, то широкая полемика о ноле среди других значимых модернистов в России привлекла интерес исследователей относительно недавно. В этом контексте, статья определяет роль Крученых в дискуссии о ноле. Автор анализирует как теоретическое, так и практическое значение отношения Крученых к своей заумной поэзии как к модернистской нулевой точке.

Jason Strudler is Associate Professor of Russian Translation at Defense Language Institute-Washington. He has published on Russian Symbolism and the Avant-Garde, and his current research focuses on the theme of zero in Russian Modernism, as well as on the relationship between contemporary Russian literature and social media.

This article examines the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandel'shtam through the lens of childhood, which both reveals new facets of their complexity and accounts for more of their contradictions than previous modes of analysis—namely those derived from feminist criticism—have done. It studies Mandel'shtam’s textual staging of both herself and her husband as metaphorical children and, in doing so, helps to resolve some of the tensions between, on the one hand, her fidelity to her spouse and longing to occupy a subservient role vis-à-vis him once more and, on the other, her “unmasking” of some the more unflattering aspects of his treatment of her and her evident enjoyment of her newfound authoritative writerly persona. By characterizing both her husband and herself as children, as well as by commenting on the fate of real, flesh-and-blood children during and after Stalin’s reign, Mandel'shtam demonstrates that vulnerability and weakness can be just as significant an affective stance through which to assert moral and writerly authority as strength. Taken together, Mandel'shtam’s use of real and metaphorical childhood in the memoirs suggests the usefulness of viewing texts from the Soviet period as anticipating recent developments in political philosophy and queer studies that critique modern liberalism through the lens of vulnerability (Martha Fineman) and futurity (Lee Edelman), respectively.

«…наша детская с тобой жизнь»: Покорность, верность, и вызов в мемуарах

Люся Зайцева

Настоящая статья предлагает анализ мемуаров Надежды Мандельштам сквозь призму детства. В работе раскрываются многие аспекты сложности и противоречий, не нашедшие достаточного отражения в предыдущих работах, — особенно в тех, которые основаны на феминистской критике. Рассматривается литературная конструкция, в которой Надежда Мандельштам представляет и себя, и своего мужа метафорическими детьми. В исследовании анализируется некоторые из противоречий между верностью и подчинением Надежды Мандельштам супругу с одной стороны и «разоблачением» некоторых из самых непозволительных поступков и чертов своего мужа, а так же её явное наслаждение своим новообретенным писательским авторитетом. Характеризуя себя и своего мужа 'детьми’ и в то же время поднимая вопрос о судьбе реальных детей при Сталине и в период после его смерти, Надежда Мандельштам демонстрирует, что ранимость и слабость являются такими же важными аффективными средствами достижения морального и авторского авторитета, как сила. Анализ образов настоящего и метафорического детства в мемуарах Надежды Мандельштам свидетельствует о полезности изучения текстов советского периода, как предшественников недавних разработок в политической философии и квир-исследований, которые критикуют современную либеральность через уязвимость (Марта Файнман) и будущность (Ли Эделман).

Lusia Zaitseva holds a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard and currently serves as a preceptor in the Harvard College Writing Program. Her research interests include childhood, poetry, and South Asian and Russian/Soviet literary exchanges. She is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Sophisticated Players: Adults Writing as Children in the Stalin Era.