This introduction explains the scholarly interventions made by the five articles in this cluster: Nikolay Karkov, “Racism and Anti-Racist Thought in Interwar Bulgaria: Some Lessons for the Contemporary Moment”; Zhivka Valiavicharska, “Plovdiv’s Bratska Mogila as a Microcosm of the 1970s in Bulgaria and the Socialist World”; Christina Novakov-Ritchey, “Locating the Peasant in Decolonial Analysis”; Marina Antić, “Socialist Modernism: Miroslav Krleža and the Poetry of Capitalist Development”; and Bojana Videkanić, “Nonaligned Modernism and Continuities of Revolution, Partisan Struggle, and Anti-Imperialism in the Work of Yugoslav Visual Artists.”

Rossen Djagalov is an Assistant Professor of Russian at New York University, an editor of LeftEast, and the author of From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (MQUP, 2020). Nikolay Karkov is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Cortland. His research explores the practices and discourses of state socialism in Eastern Europe and also conversations and collaborations between Eastern Europe and the Global South.

This article is an exploration of the momentous debates around racism and eugenics, or “racial hygiene,” that took place in Bulgaria in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Implicating some of the most influential public intellectuals and drawing much attention, those debates constitute, to this day, the high point of both racial/racist thought and anti-racist critique in the country. The text begins by looking at the context of and major protagonists in the debates, notably socio-biologists Stefan Konsulov and Metodiy Popov, before turning to philosopher Dimitŭr Mikhalchev’s liberal critique of racism and to heterodox Marxist scholar Ivan Khadzhiĭski’s less familiar yet crucial intervention in the debate. The text suggests that Mikhalchev’s strongest arguments emerge both from his proximity to historical materialism and from his anticipation of some of postcolonial theory’s major methodological insights. More importantly still, it is Khadzhiĭski’s critical discussion of the origins of Western (racial) capitalism, the role of the middle-class intelligentsia in promoting racist thinking, and the importance of political mobilization and struggle that continue to be profoundly relevant for debates around racism in the contemporary moment.

Nikolay Karkov is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Cortland. His research explores the practices and discourses of state socialism in Eastern Europe and also conversations and collaborations between Eastern Europe and the Global South.

Plovdiv’s Bratska Mogila is a remarkable work of monumental sculpture from the post-Stalinist period in Bulgaria. A symbiotic ensemble of architecture, sculpture, monumental art, and urban planning, the monument was built in 1974 as a temple to harbor the remains and the memory of young anti-fascist partisans who died in the region of Plovdiv between World War I and World War II. Inside, a sequence of nineteen monumental sculptural compositions narrates the revolutionary history of the Bulgarian people as constructed from the perspective of the 1960s and 1970s: a nationalist history rewritten through the socialist present, it also imagined and forged connections with global struggles against colonialism and racism. The monument has thus arrested the conflicting political logics of the post-Stalinist era and its worldly entanglements in all their monumentality and tension. This paper offers a historical reconstruction and a close reading of the monument, exploring post-Stalinist visions of socialism, nationhood, and the global imaginaries of the era in their tensions and contradictions.

Zhivka Valiavicharska is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, New York. She is the author of studies on the social, cultural, and visual history of socialism and postsocialism in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe, including the book Restless History: Political Imaginaries and Their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).

Foregrounding the close relationship between peasants and colonized people, this article proposes that the progressive disavowal of peasant ways of knowing and being from the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries constitutes a significantly undertheorized dimension of coloniality in the region of Southeastern Europe. With a focus on interwar Croatia, this article sheds light on how we can begin to reevaluate the epistemological, political, and cultural significance of the village, which has largely been captured by folklore, dismissed as “superstition,” or appropriated by nationalists. Anchored in discourses on the relationship between culture and decolonization authored by scholars and activists in Indigenous studies in North America and anti-colonial thinkers and organizers in Africa, the present article contributes a case study example of an agrarian communist program of cultural decolonization and anti-fascist national liberation from the interwar period in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The analysis begins by sketching out the anti-imperial agenda for decolonizing Yugoslav culture that was spearheaded by Miroslav Krleža and Krsto Hegedušić between the two World Wars. This is followed by a reconstruction of the art collective Zemlja’s collaborative program with peasant artists from rural Croatia and their significance to the grassroots communist national liberation movement. Finally, the article discusses how communist peasant aesthetics were situated as an authentic anti-imperial national culture during Yugoslav socialism in conversation with international decolonial discourses on national culture and revolution.

Christina Novakov-Ritchey is a PhD Candidate in Culture and Performance at the University of California, Los Angeles and the co-organizer of the (Post)Socialist Studies Group funded by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. In the fall of 2022, she will join the University of Houston-Clear Lake as an Assistant Professor of Humanities.

As a state-sponsored aesthetic in socialist Yugoslavia (at least since the Third Congress of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union in 1952), modernism is treated variously as a contradiction in terms, a historical curiosity, or a cynical ploy utilized by the socialist state—along with Yugoslavia’s well-known non-aligned posture and the policy of self-management—to differentiate itself from the Soviet Union. Focusing on programmatic statements of Yugoslav socialist modernism and its most representative author, Miroslav Krleža, I move beyond the Cold War emphasis on the separation of art and politics and the attendant geopolitical mapping of (socialist) realism onto the East and (apolitical) modernism onto the West. Instead, I explore how socialist modernism, of the Yugoslav variety, registers and responds to global relations of economic and social dependency, linking the Global South with the South of Europe. Methodologically, I approach the subject through a broadly conceived study of the ideology of forms, accounting for signature modernist formal experimentation and innovation by situating this unique aesthetic within its own intellectual and political milieu.

Marina Antić holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. Her research to date has explored the aesthetic of socialist modernism, seeking linkages between texts, histories, and ideas as they manifest in literary subject and form.

This paper seeks to highlight several key issues related to Yugoslav engaged art between the 1920s and 1970s that illustrate continuities in political and aesthetic concerns in Yugoslav modernism. The interwar period and World War II are paid special attention because of the role they played in shaping aesthetic and political ideas. Concepts such as anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anti-imperialism¬ were deeply entrenched in the political and aesthetic practices discussed as they shaped partisan resistance and postwar Yugoslav politics of collaboration with countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Examples of political art in the interwar period and in the periods during and immediately after World War II not only formed the basis of Yugoslavia’s modernism, but also foreshadowed socialist Yugoslavia’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement. What this text proposes is that Yugoslavia’s opening to the world in the 1950s was not prompted solely by the Cold War, but by a much longer commitment to leftist, internationalist ideas in art and politics.

Bojana Videkanić is an Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945–1985 was published by McGill-Queens University Press in 2020. Videkanić’s research focuses on 20th-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms, socialist art, and anti-imperialist cultural networks between the Second and Third Worlds. Currently, she is working on a comparative study between Yugoslav naïve and partisan art and anti-imperialist and Marxist art as it developed outside the West.

The article analyzes three interconnected leitmotifs in Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia collection (1923): the antagonism of two anomalous suns; incest or other forms of sexual “crime”; and the dying city. I argue that the solar leitmotif derives from the theurgic concept of Vyacheslav Ivanov, which is concretized mythologically in the story of Phaedra’s love for her stepson Hippolytus; Mandelstam projects his fate onto his own position as a Russian poet and a Jew. An analysis of the biographical context surrounding the poem Eta noch' nepopravima (the death of the mother due to the father’s affair), and the subtexts of the poem Vernis' v smesitel'noe lono (from Gerhart Hauptmann’s work) lead to the conclusion that Mandelstam is drawing a distinction between two types of sexual aberration: a sexual drive originating from a senior and important figure, and a calculated affair originating from a junior, dependent figure. According to Mandelstam’s historiosophy, the first kind of aberration is ungodly, fraught with the reverse flow of time, which manifests itself in the destruction of cities (Sodom, Troy, etc.). Only the redemptory death of the theurgist, the object of the illicit passion, can prevent it. Aberrations of the second kind, however, are godly; they ensure the natural flow of historic time.

Evgeny Soshkin received a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he subsequently participated in the research project The Bible in the Russian Modernism. He authored Gipogrammatika: Kniga o Mandel'shtame (Hypogrammar: A Book on Mandelstam, 2015), Bottlenecks: Hypotextual Levels of Meaning in Russian Literary Tradition (2020), and numerous articles on history, poetics, and theory of literature. He co-edited Imperiia N: Nabokov i nasledniki (Empire N: Nabokov and Heirs, 2006), Gendelev: Stikhi. Proza. Poetika. Tekstologiia (Gendelev: Verses. Prose. Poetics. Textology, 2017), and other scholarly editions. He taught at the University of Konstanz. Currently he teaches at the Brīvā Universitāte.

This essay examines attempts by Alexander Prokhanov and Zakhar Prilepin to mobilize the word toward the rebuilding of Russia’s grand narratives in the context of the current Donbas conflict (now a war). For a number of contemporary Russian cultural figures, the eastern Ukrainian Donbas has been integral to a broader push to reinvigorate the empire ideology that had appeared defunct following the fall of the USSR. Unsurprisingly, both Prilepin and his spiritual mentor Prokhanov have made significant contributions here, emphasizing the importance of literature as a means not merely of chronicling conflict, but of constructing a new imperial consciousness, one aimed at countering the ideological and spiritual disarray of post-communism. Prilepin is particularly noteworthy in this regard, having created his own “Prilepin Battalion” to fight for the Donetsk People’s Republic, and in his aggressive promotion of a new literature of conflict whose genealogy stretches back across several centuries of Russia’s wars.

Keith A. Livers is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches 20th and 21st-century Russian culture and literature. He has published books about Stalinist ideology and mythology, conspiracy rhetoric in post-Soviet culture, and is currently at work on a book project about the Donbas conflict.