Postwar literature in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly as it has been framed in Western Europe and North America, has been shaped by strong personalities whose exile from their respective homelands helped enshroud their critiques of authoritarianism in so-called “moral authority.” But in quitting the Soviet Union, Poland, or Czechoslovakia for new lives in countries like the United States and France, these writers often found themselves in the midst of sociopolitical upheavals whose terms they scarcely understood and to whose contexts their own struggles offered no clear analogy. This paper reevaluates the Western careers of four of the most prominent authors to whom such “moral authority” has been generally ascribed—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, and Milan Kundera—against the backdrop of the struggle for civil rights and racial justice in their adopted countries.

Benjamin Paloff is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan. His most recent book is Lost in the Shadow of the Word (Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe).

This article employs settler colonial theory to analyze the functioning of race as a discursive practice in early post-Soviet Crimea. Although the official Soviet ideology was anti-racist and promoted “equality” among different nationalities, Crimean Tatars faced discrimination on the basis of belonging to their national group. The fall of the USSR posed a serious threat to the Crimean settler colonial regime. The repatriation of Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of Crimea, posed a direct demand for decolonization. This article shows how racial relations in Crimea existed in the space of “unspoken” politics, when words contradicted actions and when formalities camouflaged discrimination.

Maksym Sviezhentsev received a PhD in 2020 from the University of Western Ontario. His dissertation is titled "Phantom Limb": Russian Settler Colonialism in the Post-Soviet Crimea (1991–1997). Maksym completed a Master’s program in History at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla academy and in Eastern European Studies at Warsaw University. He is now working to prepare his dissertation for publication.

This paper examines Russia’s and the Soviet Union’s persistent reinterpretation of the American film classic, Gone with the Wind, as a distinctly Russian epic, especially focusing on the interpretation of the film as a metaphor and rhetorical pattern for the Russian “nostalgia for empire” that underwrites the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and its ongoing occupation of Crimea and eastern regions of Ukraine. Race relations and the conflict between the industrialized US North and agrarian/low-tech US South get rewritten in the USSR and Russia as a practical example of the Russian Idea, of the inevitable conflict between East and West and a sense of “truer authenticity” of nationality (narodnost').

Michael Denner is Professor of Russian Studies at Stetson University in DeLand, FL. He edits the Tolstoy Studies Journal.

An overlooked detail linking together the great names of postwar Soviet cinema—Leonid Gaidai, El'dar Riazanov, Vladimir Vysotskii, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Bondarchuk, and even Winnie-the-Pooh—is their embrace of blackface, either donning it themselves as actors or encouraging its use in the films they directed. This essay contests that blackface is not simply an awkward detail in several postwar Soviet film classics but is, in fact, a device onto which filmmakers and viewers displaced and registered the subterranean tensions of the Stalinist past and the changing dynamics of the de-Stalinizing present. Through readings of Tarkovsky’s The Killers (Ubiitsy, 1956), Riazanov’s The Man from Nowhere (Chelovek niotkuda, 1961), Gaidai’s Operation “Y” and Shurik’s Other Adventures (Operatsiia “y” i drugie prikliucheniia Shurika, 1965), Sergei Yutkevich’s Othello (Otello, 1955), Aleksandr Mitta’s How Tsar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor (Skaz pro to, kak tsar' Petr arapa zhenil, 1976), and Fyodor Khitruk’s Winnie-the-Pooh (Vinni-Pukh, 1969–1972), I argue that post-Stalinist cinema employs blackface as a receptacle for Stalinism’s “dark” legacy. It functioned for audiences as a grotesque source of misrecognition, facilitating idealized images of Soviet-ness, i.e., whiteness, by defining it against that which it was not (Blackness; African-ness) in a time of cultural flux.

Raymond DeLuca is a sixth-year PhD student at Harvard University in Slavic Languages and Literatures with a secondary field in Art, Film, and Visual Studies. He is currently finishing his dissertation about animals in Soviet cinema. His writing on cinema has been published in Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Film Criticism, KinoKultura, and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.

In Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Rebecca Walkowitz argues that translation, as a “thematic, structural, conceptual, and sometimes even typographical device,” is foundational to the contemporary Anglophone novel (4). In my essay, I use Walkowitz’s concept to reveal the inter-imperial configurations and, by extension, racialization processes that this display of multilingualism traces. The racialization processes introduced and reproduced by linguistic means are central to the experience of the minoritized characters featured in my archive.
To this end, I analyze an epistolary novel entitled Sahib: Impressions from Depression (Sahib: Impresije iz Depresije) (2010) written in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) by Nenad Veličković and translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth. A series of English-language emails that the unnamed British diplomat (“Sahib”) newly arrived in Bosnia sends to his lover in London organizes the novel. Its form introduces a literary partition by embedding a British intermediary who filters the figure of the so-called native, Sakib—Sahib’s driver. In the epilogue, a translator figure within the fictional frame of the novel notes that the emails have been translated from English to BCMS, unsettling the primacy and authority of the Englishman. In other words, everything the Englishman says has gone through a process of interpretation and negotiation directed by the fictionalized BCMS translator. It is thus the post-Yugoslav translator who mediates and voices a purportedly “authentic” Anglophone imperialist.
Expanding Walkowitz’s concept by being born translated into BCMS rather than English, Sahib invites attention to Balkan forms of postcoloniality and race. I argue that the multilingualism Sahib stages through translation gives form to alternative postcolonial frameworks that qualify whiteness through their dependence on language politics, racio-religious demarcations, and migration experiences—what I collectively call “forms of foreignness.” A close reading of language politics helps challenge the supposed illegibility of race politics that constitutes an identifying characteristic of racialization in the Balkans. Moreover, as a function of what Laura Doyle calls “inter-imperiality,” Sahib brings into consideration empires usually outside the purview of postcolonial studies: the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the American Empire. These empires account for a complex racio-religious configuration involving multiple religious traditions: Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Judaic, and Muslim. Thus, while Balkan populations may be white, one discerns a racial discourse rooted particularly in language politics, which embed racio-religious markers and imperial legacies in the longue durée. The essay emphasizes the need to pluralize multilingualism through deep historicization and close reading. The work of Manuela Boatcă, Anca Parvulescu, Maria Todorova, Piro Rexhepi, Milica Bakić-Hayden, and Laura Doyle substantiates the need to distinguish where in Europe and in which Europe the Balkans—and specific to this project, the former Yugoslavia and, more specifically still, the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina—are located.

Ena Selimović is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in the Program in American Studies and in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis. She co-founded the translation collective Turkoslavia.

Closeness (Tesnota, dir. Kantemir Balagov, 2017), is a striking example of contemporary Russian cinema due to its sustained focus on two groups of ethnic “others” (Jews and Kabardians) living in one of the poorest and most conflict-ridden areas of Russia: Kabardino-Balkaria in the North Caucasus. Set in 1998, when interethnic tensions after the First Chechen War remained high, Closeness focuses on a young Jewish girl, Ila, whose relationship with a Kabardian boy clashes with her family’s cultural expectations. These tensions are compounded after Ila’s brother and his fiancée are kidnapped by Islamist terrorists. Throughout Closeness, spatial, ethnic, religious, and gendered marginalities converge sharply: space is fundamental to its discourse of identity and belonging. Thus, through examining the representation of the key spaces in the film (Ila’s home, the synagogue, the gas station, the city of Nalʹchik, and the Caucasus Mountains), this article demonstrates that Closeness wistfully gestures to a civic (rossiiskii) understanding of nationhood. However, as I show, the film’s implicit civic identification comes at the expense of Jewish and Kabardian ethnocultural identities. The film’s discourse therefore resonates with longstanding debates in official discourse over civic and ethnic definitions of Russian nationhood. Furthermore, as Kolstø and Blakkisrud (2017) have shown, ethnic (russkii) definitions appear to be increasingly crowding out civic definitions since Vladimir Putin’s third term as president (2012–2018). Thus, in this context, Closeness can be read as a repudiation of an increasingly ethnonational framing of collective identity. More broadly, the identity discourse explored in Closeness is relevant to ongoing debates in nations around the world, including those in the “West,” in which official discourse on the nation has been framed from a progressively more ethnonational standpoint since the 2010s.

Adelaide McGinity-Peebles is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Nottingham, where she is conducting her project “Figurations of the Arctic in Russian Cinema, 2010–Present.” She obtained her PhD in 2020 from the University of Manchester, where she wrote her PhD thesis on representations of the provinces in contemporary Russian film. She is developing her thesis into a monograph and has contributed articles based on her PhD research to Film Studies, The Routledge Companion to European Cinema, and The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Communication.

In the state of Ohio, nine secondary schools have Russian language programs. This article will document the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies’s (CSEEES) and the Department for Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures’s (DSEELC) work over the past ten years to start and support a Russian language program at an economically and ethnically diverse middle and high school in a public-school system in the state. This school offers a unique curricular opportunity to students in that students must study multiple languages and international studies.
Throughout the Russian language program’s history, there have been two key obstacles affecting the program that have had to be overcome to ensure the program’s success and longevity: funding and personnel. However, despite these obstacles, we argue that while this Russian language program is relatively small, it is important because in comparison to the profiles of the other schools offering Russian in Ohio, only one other program reaches a similar number of diverse students. This is only made more important as many Russian language programs in the state face uncertain futures. As part of this article, we will also discuss pedagogical approaches to K–12 Russian language programs, strategies for engaging and mentoring K–12 students, the benefits of foreign language study and college mentoring programs for participating students, and examples to date of the program’s successes. By sharing our insights and observations to date, we aim to argue for the importance of Russian language programs at the K–12 level as an important part of diversifying the field of Slavic studies.

Larysa Stepanova is a Language Program Coordinator at the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. She holds a PhD in Slavic Sociolinguistics and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. She has been involved with book and article reviews for multiple presses in Second Language Acquisition, bilingualism, and language pedagogy.
Eileen Kunkler is the assistant director at the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at The Ohio State University. In this role, she oversees center programming and activities, including K–12 and community outreach, and works with community stakeholders.

Russia’s unique geographical position—and, more importantly, its social, cultural, and political self-positioning—between Europe and Asia gives rise to a complex dynamics of identity that readily lends itself to an intercultural and transnational approach in teaching as well as research. This essay revisits traditional frameworks of understanding Russia between East and West to propose a methodology of teaching Russian literature and culture that draws on the diversity inherent to the region under study. I explore ways in which reapproaching the Asia/Europe binary as a site of questioning can enable us to broaden course syllabi and understandings of literary canons; to reexamine familiar texts with an eye to the ways in which authors and their characters engage with cross-cultural currents; to study structures of Russian imperial power and their ramifications for the daily lives of imperial subjects; and to incorporate less familiar texts, including journals, dictionaries, and letters, as material examples of the hybrid cultures of diverse populations in contact.

D. Brian Kim is Assistant Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Russian literature of the long nineteenth century, translation studies, and literary and cultural relationships between Russia, Western Europe, and East Asia. His current book project examines the cultures, practices, and ideologies of multilingualism in imperial Russia.

Between November 1891 and June 1893, as famine spread to seventeen provinces in European Russia, Tolstoy headed a famine aid project that ensured the survival of thousands of people: a network of communal kitchens. His writing from the time reveals that his approach to famine relief was informed by scientific debate between Russian and British thinkers about “the struggle for existence” and the dichotomy of competition versus cooperation—a debate in which, not coincidentally, Russian naturalists agreed with anarchists on the primacy of “the law of mutual aid.” Mutual aid is cited and coded in Tolstoy’s writing and, ultimately, I argue, informed not only his theory of social change but also the role and mechanisms by which art enables social change. In his essays about the famine, Tolstoy developed a theory of change through a form of famine aid that “infects” those it involves, so that vulnerability, risk, and moral benefits are more evenly distributed across the community, ensuring its survival and moral flourishing. This theory of “infectious” transformation reappears in What Is Art?, making possible the analysis of similarities between mutual aid and aesthetic experience—both operate via horizontal transmission of inspiration that Tolstoy describes as “infectious.” Tolstoy’s discussion of the communal kitchen is revisited in this paper in light of new scholarship exploring infectiousness, the ongoing Coronavirus epidemic, and increasing public attention to mutual aid. Contemporary mutual aid groups share common roots with Tolstoy’s famine aid, hearkening back to early modern mutual and friendly societies and Quaker relief systems, to the settlement house movement, and later the Catholic Worker Movement.

Ania Aizman is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan and a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows.

This article offers an examination of Konstantin Bal'mont’s translations of classical Japanese poetry into Russian. Working primarily with an existing Russian prose translation and commentary by Yamaguchi Moichi to supplement his own incomplete knowledge of Japanese, Bal'mont produced poetic translations of dozens of tanka and hokku between 1916 and 1923. Poems of these genres seek to convey a single impression of a poet’s subjective experience while observing a strictly limited syllabic economy; Bal'mont discusses the difficulty of conveying this impression given not only the formal dissimilarities between the Russian and Japanese languages and poetic traditions, but also variances in a category he calls impressionability, which denotes a way of perceiving—an implicit aesthetics—and describes the degree of receptivity on the part of the reader.
Complicating the rhetorical configuration of poet, translator, and reader, awareness of the concept of impressionability obliges translators to tailor their strategies to the needs of a given readership beyond the level of linguistic equivalence. Through a series of close readings of Bal'mont’s poetic translations alongside Yamaguchi’s prose translations and the poems in the original Japanese, I investigate this Russo-Japanese poetic encounter as a case study in translatability and its role in the poet’s understanding of the task of the translator. I argue that Bal'mont’s approach to the translation of classical Japanese poetry, which consciously balances the impression of the poem against the impressionability of its reader, at once seeks to establish a dialogic relationship between two aesthetic systems and to discover the spaces they have in common. Bal'mont’s translations thus affirm the significance of linguistic and cultural specificity even as they envision a universal ideal of translatability.

D. Brian Kim is Assistant Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Russian literature of the long nineteenth century, translation studies, and literary and cultural relationships between Russia, Western Europe, and East Asia. His current book project examines the cultures, practices, and ideologies of multilingualism in imperial Russia.