In the 1950s, Yugoslavia started undertaking infrastructure projects abroad and funding scholarship programs for foreign students, which precipitated the movement of people from African and Asian countries into Yugoslavia. The creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961 further increased these interactions. Individuals from the nonaligned world contributed to a change in the composition, cultural products, and, arguably, even cultural imaginary of Yugoslavia, leaving an indelible mark on film, music, and Yugoslav ideas surrounding Blackness. In this article I interrogate three uses of Blackness in Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav Serbia to explore how the transmission of global, social, and cultural hierarchies impacted student migrants from the Global South whose primary defining features manifested through their difference from the majority. I conclude the article by exploring how these dialogues of difference are enlivened anew in the “Serbia in the World” program, a scholarship scheme providing funds for citizens of current Non-Aligned observer and member nations to study in Serbia.

Sunnie Rucker-Chang is Assistant Professor of Slavic and East European Studies and Director of European Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her primary interests lie in cultural and racial formation(s) in the Balkans. She is co-author of Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and contributor to and co-editor of Chinese Migrants in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2013). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Critical Romani Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Her current project traces the uses of “Blackness” and racial discourse in the Balkans..

This study examines ways in which theatre has constructed national narratives in postcolonial and postcommunist Macedonian cultures. It focuses on Balkan is Not Dead, or the Magic of Edelweiss (1992), Dejan Dukovski’s acclaimed remake of the 1900 melodrama Macedonian Blood Wedding by Voidan Cernodrinski. Both plays reflect on specific cultural politics resulting from the decentralization of the Ottoman Empire and the communist ‘Yugo Empire’, respectively, in order to construct symbolic narratives in reaction to local as well as global contexts. The analysis attempts to unravel the extent of Dukovski’s postmodern deconstruction as well as restorative re-construction that simultaneously undermine as well as assert post/national formations. Ultimately, it attempts to throw light on the unique Macedonian identities that have emerged within as well as against postcolonial discourses throughout the twentieth century.

Vessela S. Warner is an Associate Professor of theatre history and dramatic literature at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her research focuses on cultural representations in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian theatre, film and performance. Her co-edited collection, Staging Postcommunism: Alternative Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989 was published by the University of Iowa Press (2020). Besides this international collection, Warner has contributed to The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (Routledge, 2015), From Exsilium to Exile: Forced Migrations in Historical Perspective (University of Gdansk Press, 2014), International Women Stage Directors (University of Illinois Press, 2013), Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theatre (Miami University Press, 2009), and Theatre and Performance in Eastern Europe: The Changing Scene (Scarecrow Press 2008). Her articles have appeared in numerous academic journals.

This paper reads Aleksandar Zograf’s Regards from Serbia: A Cartoonist's Diary of a Crisis in Serbia (2007)—a highly eclectic (and genre transgressive) volume, comprised of comic strips, e-mails, a comic diary, and graphic postcards— its production and circulation, with a two-fold aim in mind. First, by focusing on both thematic and genre concerns, I illustrate the transnational nature of the volume which is born and shaped by economic, political and cultural interactions that reach across multiple borders. Second, I am interested in the forms of affect, empathy in particular, and the role it has with reference to the US/Western rhetoric about the Balkans, as different manifestations of empathy here unsettle the power dynamics and hierarchies which have defined the Balkan “other” in Western discourse. My paper argues that the multimodality of the text, its transnational production and circulation vividly speak to us now in the present when blog posts go viral and when Facebook, Twitter, and instant forms of communication inform our understanding of contemporary events.

Ioana Luca Associate Professor, Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, has published on life writing, exiles’ literature, and connections between the United States and Eastern Europe. Her publications include articles in Social Text, Rethinking History, Prose Studies, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, European Journal of Life Writing, and Journal of American Studies, chapters in several edited volumes, and a coedited special issue(with Claudia Sadowski-Smith) of Twentieth-Century Literature entitled Postsocialist Literatures in the US (2019).

In August 2017 Amazon released an original series entitled Comrade Detective. In their introduction, the producers maintained that the series was produced in the 1980s Romania and they recovered, restored, dubbed, and released it for American and international audiences. This and other production choices, including using dubbing as translation, bring into discussion American nostalgia for the Cold War political status quo, in the context of current ideological uncertainty. This chapter argues that Comrade Detective offers for consumption an object of ironic nostalgia that is speaking both to the Cold War past, its propaganda mechanisms, and its veiling of historical truths, as well as to the present, and its more chaotic power and influence structure. These past and present are joined, like superimposed photos, in the process of dubbing, that hides one voice - the minor Romanian one - while foregrounding the American narrative. Comrade Detective engages with nostalgia that leads to the creation of an object, a fantasy of adaptation, where the original is the translation. The series creates the original it desires and then speaks back at it.

Oana Popescu-Sandu is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Indiana. Her research currently focuses on English language literature by Eastern European transnational authors after 1989, including issues of identity and immigration, translation and translingualism. Her recent publications include: “Staging the Postsocialist Woman: Saviana Stanescu’s Alternative Transnations.” Twentieth Century Literature, Special issue: Postsocialist Literatures in the United States, edited by Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Ioana Luca, vol. 65, nos. 1–2, 2019, pp.167–83; “Translingualism as Dialogism in American-Romanian Poetry.” Journal of World Literature, vol. 3, no. 1, 2018.

Many Dostoevsky scholars will know letter he wrote his brother in March 1864, in which he complains of censorship: “The censors are a bunch of pigs—those places where I mocked everything and occasionally employed blasphemy for the sake of form they allowed to stand; but when, from all that, I deduced the need for faith and for Christ, they took it out.” The work in question is Notes from Underground, and there is indeed a scholarly consensus that, censorship notwithstanding, the text is deeply religious in its concerns, and that its message is ultimately one of self-abnegating Christian compassion. This dimension is certainly present, but there is another, more skeptical religious thread coursing through Part II of the work.

This essay presents a theological reading of Notes from Underground that analyzes the Underground Man’s anxieties about material, bodily existence alongside Pauline theology of resurrection of the flesh. [It] focuses in particular on an image of a dead prostitute lying trapped in her grave, pleading to be let out to live in the world again, but seemingly unable to receive the promise of resurrection. The Underground Man uses this image to terrorize the prostitute Liza with her own likely fate, but, I argue, it is also a projection of his own spiritual anxieties, and as such constitutes a lens through which to read the text as a whole. Notes can be thought of as structured by the potential resurrection from the shadowy, quasi-incorporeal underground and into what the Underground Man calls “real life” or “living life.” This transition, however, is fraught with problems for him, not least of which is that is always premised on incurring debt, which, indeed, reflects transactional language in Paul’s epistles regarding resurrection. Bringing Notes into dialogue with Paul reveals an aspect of the text that has been relatively unexplored, and also illuminates how it functions for Dostoevsky to work through his own religious doubts.

Недоношенное воскрешение в Записках из подполья

Макс Гордон

Многие достоевсковеды хорошо знают письмо, написанное Ф.М. Достоевским брату в марте 1864 года, в котором он жалуется на то, что «Свиньи цензора, там, где я глумился над всем и иногда богохульствовал для виду, — то пропущено, а где из всего этого я вывел потребность веры и Христа, — то запрещено.» Речь идёт о Записках из подполья, и исследователи, действительно, единодушны во мнении, что, не смотря на цензуру, этот текст затрагивает глубоко религиозные вопросы, и что его «мораль» состоит в необходимости самопожертвенного христианского сострадания. Однако есть и другая, более скептическая религиозная мысль, которая красной нитью проходит через вторую часть повести. Данная статья представляет теологическое прочтение Записок из подполья и анализирует мучения «подпольного человека» о вещественном, телесном существовании наряду с теологией апостола Павла о воскрешении тела.

Особое внимание в статье уделяется изображению мёртвой проститутки, заточенной в могилy, и просящей, чтобы ее выпустили снова жить, но неспособной получить обещание на воскрешение. Подпольный человек терроризирует проститутку Лизу этим изображением ее возможной судьбы, но, как показывает автор данной работы, оно является психологической проекцией духовных терзаний самого подпольного человека и формирует угол зрения для прочтения всего текста. В некотором смысле, Записки структурно организованы вокруг возможного воскрешения из мрачного, полуневещественного подполья в «живую жизнь». Этот переход, однако, изобилует проблемами, не меньшей из которых является то, что он основывается на долговой зависимости, что отражает транзакционный язык в писаниях Павла о воскрешении. Прочтение Записок в диалоге с Павлом (с посланиями Павла?) открывает довольно неисследованный аспект повести и далее показывает, как Достоевский в Записках формулирует и выражает собственные религиозные сомнения.

Max Gordon is a PhD candidate wrapping up his dissertation at Northwestern University. His thesis is a comparative project on the relationship between capitalism and Christianity in the works of Dostoevsky and Herman Melville. It explores how both Russian Orthodoxy and American Protestantism framed themselves in relation to capitalist economic development in the nineteenth century, and Dostoevsky and Melville’s insights to the theological implications of this development. Other research interests include modernist poetry and art, as well as cinema, in particular Tarkovsky.

Taking as its point of departure recent scholarship that reexamines the role and motivations of Dostoevsky’s literary heroes, this article argues that Dostoevsky’s narratives model the pernicious effects of overly confident “reading”—of literary texts as of people—by drawing attention to overstepping character-narrators whose narrative reach exceeds their grasp.

In Poor Folk [Bednye liudi, 1846], Makar Devushkin reads [into] Varvara Alekseevna’s letters just as he famously [mis-]reads characters in Pushkin and Gogol, making it ever more significant that his literary tastes are questionable at best, and that he reads naïvely, tone-deaf to the very distinctions (between narrator, author, and character) by which he is himself defined. As an overbearing character-narrator, who confidently reduces his interlocutor to a knowable character in his own story, Makar shares more than a few sympathies with the unnamed pawnbroker of Dostoevsky’s late story “The Meek One” [“Krotkaia,” 1876], whose attempt to exert total control over his voiceless wife—both physically and discursively—results in her suicide.

In a series of close readings, this article attends to the intersection of narrative and ethics in these two texts, both of which model situations in which naïve reading and problematic narrating overlap as a problem of paraleptic character-narrators who, despite lacking omniscience, still strive for something like it anyway.

"В том-то и весь ужас мой, что я всё понимаю!": Нарративная этика неверного прочтения Другого в «Бедных людях» и «Кроткой» Достоевского

Томас Дайн

В данной статье рассматривается, как сочинения Достоевского обращают внимание не только на совершаемые героями этические решения, но и на этичность повествования как такового. Благодаря тому, как в них представлены герои-рассказчики, неправильно интерпретирующие мысли других персонажей, читатель Достоевского неизбежно задается вопросами пределов всезнания повествователя и этического эффекта собственного чтения. В статье рассматривается, как в такого рода сценах неверного прочтения в первом романе Достоевского «Бедныe люди» и его позднем рассказе «Кроткая» рассказчику в действительности не удаётся «понять всё» о Другом. В знаменитых эпизодах его неправильного прочтения текстов Пушкина и Гоголя Макар Девушкин повторяет ошибки, совершенные им в переписке, из которой очевидно, что он не понимает границ своей способности рассказывать и читать. В статье утверждается, что наивная эстетика писем Макара Девушкина предвосхищает рассказчика «Кроткой», где всё наше понимание кроткой основано на ненадёжном повествовании от лица её мужа. В результате, выводя на передний план этическую сторону чтения, повествование Достоевского демонстрирует нам, насколько наш собственный процесс чтения напоминает чтение его героев.

Thomas H. J. Dyne is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Wooster. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. His research investigates the intersection of narrative and ethics in the nineteenth-century Russian novel, and he is currently working on a project that maps the introduction and use of the firearm as a narrative device.

This article discusses the literary practice of self-translation by Stanisław Barańczak (1946–2014), one of the leading poets of late twentieth-century Poland, a dissident intellectual, and later an émigré and professor at Harvard University. It focuses on the poet’s only book-length collection published in the United States, The Weight of the Body (1989), as well as touches on other poems co-translated with Clare Cavanagh years later. The article’s main import is a more nuanced reading of the poet’s creative process of self-translation. It argues that Barańczak’s self-translated poetry, when read alongside the originals, become a conscious and critical dialogue with a range of literary conventions and expectations among a U.S. audience. In particular, Barańczak’s texts revise clichés recurring in the U.S. perspective on Eastern European migrant authors; at the same, they also blur the line between original and translation by pointing to the text’s double nature. The article places Barańczak’s self-translations against the backdrop of the poet’s essays on writing in a foreign language, his unpublished correspondence with Czesław Miłosz from the Beinecke Library at Yale and, more broadly, the reception of Eastern European writers in the late twentieth century.

Druga natura: Barańczak tłumaczy Barańczaka Ameryce

Kasia Szymanska

Przedmiotem niniejszego artykułu są autoprzekłady literackie Stanisława Barańczaka (1946– 2014), jednego z wybitnych polskich poetów drugiej połowy XX wieku i aktywnego działacza opozycji antykomunistycznej, który w latach 80. wyemigrował do Stanów Zjednoczonych, by objąć profesurę na Uniwersytecie Harvardzkim. Artykuł skupia się na analizie jedynego tomu poetyckiego, który autor opublikował po angielsku w USA, pod tytułem The Weight of the Body (Ciężar ciała, 1989), a także odnosi się do innych wierszy współtłumaczonych później z Clare Cavanagh. Celem analizy jest bardziej zniuansowane odczytanie twórczego procesu autoprzekładu u Barańczaka. Równoległa lektura oryginałów i autoprzekładów sugeruje, że stanowią one świadomy i autokrytyczny dialog artysty z różnymi konwencjami literackimi oraz z oczekiwaniami amerykańskich odbiorców. Po pierwsze, teksty Barańczaka dokonują rewizji interpretacyjnych klisz przewijających się w amerykańskiej recepcji autorów z Europy Wschodniej oraz poddają krytyce amerykański imperializm. Po drugie, sygnalizując swoją podwójną naturę, dwujęzyczne teksty komplikują tradycyjne rozróżnienie między oryginałem a przekładem. W artykule autoprzekłady Barańczaka zostały omówione na tle różnych kontekstów: dwujęzycznej eseistyki poety dotyczącej pisania w obcym języku, niepublikowanej korespondencji z Czesławem Miłoszem znajdującej się w Bibliotece Beinecke na Uniwersytecie Yale oraz szerszych tendencji w anglojęzycznej recepcji pisarzy z Europy Wschodniej w drugiej połowie XX wieku.

Kasia Szymanska is the Thomas Brown Assistant Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies at Trinity College Dublin and a research associate of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre, which she co-convened in 2016–2019 during her Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in PMLA, Contemporary Literature and edited volumes on the intersection between literature, translation and politics. She was awarded the 2015 EST Translation Prize, represented Oxford in the 2019 CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute “Challenges of Translation,” and remains involved in the AHRC/OWRI “Creative Multilingualism”collaborative research project at Oxford.

Besprizornost', or childhood homelessness, was one of the most serious social problems Soviet Union had ever faced, and was greatly exacerbated by the dramatic historical events that country experienced during the twentieth century. My article will compare some depictions of the Soviet cities as narrated by children left alone. It will analyze descriptions of the cities of Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Tashkent, found in selected novels and short stories of the 1920s and 1930s, in order to explore what these places meant to besprizorniki. Lastly, it will focus on what insights the city narrated by the street child can offer into twentieth century Russia from an innovative perspective, where the city becomes both the social and narrative context of childhood homelessness.

The two World Wars, the Civil War, the famine and the Stalinist purges hit the Soviet Union hard, but their effects were particularly devastating on the lower social classes, leaving tens of thousands of children from such families living in extremely precarious conditions. Millions of children left alone ended up living on the streets. Hordes of orphans from the countryside poured into the cities in search of food and shelter, and enormous open-air shelters soon sprang up, where a daily fight for survival took place. Stations and markets were the urban spaces where street urchins could find food and money, as well as the orphanage, detskij dom, which became their only home, gradually replacing the role of the family. However, for besprizorniki, cities were not only their route to survival. In the child’s imagination, urban spaces turned into faraway lands where a better life was possible, a mythical city where the great success of socialism would be celebrated.

Города беспризорников: образы советского города в литературе глазами уличного ребенка

Диана Антонелло

Данная статья посвящена литературным описаниям трех советских городов глазами беспризорников. В ней рассмотрены изображения городов: Москвы, Петрограда и Ташкента в некоторых романах и рассказах 1920-х и 1930-х годов, с акцентом на то, что данные места обозначали для этих детей.

Особое внимание в статье уделяется новаторским перспективам, которые эти рассказы беспризорников о городах могут предложить о России двадцатого века, где город становится одновременно средой разрушительных переживаний, а также пространством социальной трансформации ребенка. Город действительно играет символическую роль, поскольку он представляет собой не только место социальной маргинализации детей, ужесточающее социальный конфликт между беспризорником и новым советским обществом, но и идеальное место, где этот конфликт может быть разрешен благодаря перевоспитанию беспризорника и его превращению в нового человека. Анализируя литературные изображения городов глазами беспризорников, статья рассматривает, как менялась символическая роль детской беспризорности, превращая наследие прошлых трагедий в человеческий материал, который необходимо было переработать для создания новой советской молодежи.

Diana Antonello is a PhD candidate in Russian Literature at the University of Padua. She is currently working on her dissertation about the depictions of the homeless children in Russian children’s literature of 1920s and 1930s. Her research interests focus on Soviet children’s literature, Socialist Realism and the historical and literary representations of child homelessness in the Soviet Union.

Despite their focal prescence throughout his work, Andrei Tarkovsky’s onscreen animals have attracted scant critical attention. Yet recent scholarship has demonstrated the fruitfulness of “bestializing” the work of canonical filmmakers in studying cinema’s relation to history, ethics, and aesthetics. Therefore, Tarkovsky—a Soviet filmmaker, whose oeuvre abounds with wildlife—occupies a productive juncture from which to initiate a discourse about the filmic animal in Soviet film criticism. While Tarkovsky did not actively engage critical theory on the question of the animal, his onscreen portrayal of animality nevertheless reflects an array of theoretical insight from Nietzsche to Haraway to Berger. This article, traversing Tarkovsky’s work non-linearly, synthesizes the various significances inferred from the major bestial encounters across his cinema, hence the notion of a “cinesafari,” to uncover what Tarkovsky reveals to us about animality. Specifically, this kino-safari assumes an especial interest in the mediative role imaging technology plays in Tarkovsky’s animal representation.

Кино-сафари Тарковского: животные в фильмах Андрея Тарковского

Рэймонд Де Люка

Несмотря на то, что животные занимают центральное место в фильмах Андрея Тарковского, эта тема не привлекала особого внимания критиков. Существующая критика обращает больше внимания на их аллегорические значения, чем на их статус физических объектов, пойманных в сложные сети технологий, насилия и межвидовых столкновений. В данной статье животные Тарковского рассматриваются не как символические абстракции, а как живые объекты: физически уязвимые существа, служащие интересам человека. По мнению автора этой статьи, хотя Тарковский представляет животных в качестве траурного ностальгического комментария на место человека в современном мире, он противоречит сам себе, поскольку повторяет те же антропоцентрические идеи, которые он пытается критиковать, превращая животных в аллегорию. В то же время внимание Тарковского в фильмах к животным как к животным, то есть к их физическому существованию или их отсутствию, внимание к их взгляду, уязвимости—показывает, как, с одной стороны, зависимость режиссёра от кинематографического инструментария для воспроизведения животных на экране противоречит отрицанию им современных технологий, а с другой стороны, как животное само решает за себя, что значительно сильнее, чем неполноценное, часто насильственное, использование Тарковским этого инструментария. Это кино-сафари, представляющее своего рода монтаж движущихся образов животных Тарковского, рассматривает всевозможные варианты, при которых животные в фильмах режиссера выходят за рамки символизма.

Raymond De Luca is a PhD student at Harvard University, where he studies Russian and Soviet culture and cinema. He received a BA in Russian and history from Haverford College in 2014 and an MA in Russian studies from Middlebury College in 2018. His dissertation focuses on the significance of animal life in (post-)Soviet cinema, with particular emphasis on the works of Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kira Muratova, and Aleksandr Sokurov.