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This book presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues: with the emerging Soviet Union and with the dizzying world of European modernism that surrounded them in the West. The book's chapters address generational differences, literary polemics and experimentation, the heritage of pre-October Russian modernism, and the fate of individual writers and critics, offering a sweeping view of how exiles created a literary diaspora. The discussion moves beyond Russian studies to contribute to today's broad, cross-cultural study of the creative side of political and cultural displacement.
About the author
Greta Slobin (PhD Yale University) was professor of literature at University of California-Santa Cruz and also taught at Amherst College, Wesleyan University, and SUNYAlbany. She was a long-time Senior Research Fellow at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University and spent a year at Harvard University on an NEH fellowship. Her previous publications include Aleksei Remizov: Approaches to a Protean Writer and Remizov’s Fictions: 1900–1921. Nancy Condee is on the Slavic and Film Studies faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been Director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies for over a decade (1995–2006) and is a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College (Oxford University). She is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, and serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including Kinokultura, Critical Quarterly, and Russian Studies in Literature. She has served for six years as Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is author of Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution and coauthor with Michael Holquist of Mikhail Bakhtin.
Summary
This book presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues: with the emerging Soviet Union and with the dizzying world of European modernism that surrounded them in the West. The book's chapters address generational differences, literary polemics and experimentation, the heritage of pre-October Russian modernism, and the fate of individual writers and critics, offering a sweeping view of how exiles created a literary diaspora. The discussion moves beyond Russian studies to contribute to today’s broad, cross-cultural study of the creative side of political and cultural displacement.
Additional text
“Framed by several critical models, including neocolonial, the book is rich in observations on the nexus between the national canon, exile and modernism....Greta Slobin’s book will play an important part in emigre studies, where a decisive shift has occurred during the last decade from describing the long neglected material and ‘filling the gaps’ to conceptualizing and contextualizing the complex network of literary discourses, solidarities and loyalties.”
