Contemporary Russophone Literature
A book-length project which examines the works by the Russophone authors who self-identify as non-Russian ethnically.
The project
This project draws on Naomi Beth Caffee’s definition of Russophonia, ‘which refers to the widespread and variegated uses of the Russian language outside of the customary boundaries of ethnicity and nation’ (Caffee 2013). In the monograph, Dr Natalia Rulyova examines works by Guzel Yakhina, Alisa Ganieva, Hamid Ismailov, Dina Rubina, Olga Breininger, Narine Abgaryan and others.
Principal Investigator
- Dr Natalia Rulyova, Associate Professor in Russia
My research interests spread across Russophone literature, translation studies, post-Soviet media culture and genre studies. My latest monograph is focused on collaborative self-translation drawing on the bilingual work of the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky.
Outputs and engagement
As part of the project and in cooperation with the Pushkin House (London),a series of conversations with Russophone authors are published on the Pushkin House YouTube channel:
- May 2023 - award-winning Tatar author Guzel Yakhina
- June 2023 - Alisa Ganieva, an award-winning Avar writer from Dagestan, who is also a political activist and a campaigner against Russia’s war in Ukraine.
- October 2024 - internationally acclaimed Uzbek author Hamid Ismailov.
All three interviews are available in full from these links and in shortened transcripts.
An adapted version of the interview with Hamid Ismailov will be published under the title ‘Breaking the Monolith of Russian-Language Culture': A Conversation with Hamid Ismailov about Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Post-Soviet Space in The Journal of Literary Multilingualism in 2024.
5-7 April 2024, Dr Rulyova helped to organise two panels on contemporary Russophone literature and gave a paper entitled ‘Identity and Diversity in Contemporary Russophone Literature: Yakhina, Ganieva and Ismailov’ at the annual conference organised by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES). (the picture below is taken Dr Alexandra Smith at BASEES 2024)
In April 2024, as PI, Dr Rulyova received BRIDGE seed funding to build interdisciplinary collaboration on research at University of Birmingham and UIUC related to Russophone literary diversity and peripheries. This will build collaborative ties between faculty members Nataliya Rulyova, Isobel Palmer and Irina Kuznetsova (University of Birmingham) and Valeria Sobol, George Gasyna, and David Cooper (UIUC), and create a wider network of scholars. There will be a two-day symposium at the University of Birmingham on 7-8 September 2024. In summer 2025, we plan to run a junior scholars workshop at Illinois, related to the Summer Research Laboratory hosted by the REEEC and the University Library.
April 2024 - at the invitation of Dr Tamar Koplatadze, Dr Rulyova gave a talk on this project at Christ Church, University of Oxford, entitled ‘Literary Diversity in Contemporary Russophone Literature: ‘Breaking the Monolith of Russian Culture’.
On 25 June 2024, in cooperation with Irina Kuznetsova and Pushkin House, Dr Rulyova is co-organising a panel entitled ‘Lived Experiences of War and Geopolitics in Russian-Language Literature after 2014. A Panel Discussion with Anna Berseneva, Katerina Gordeeva and Vladimir Sotnikov’.
Symposium on Russophone Literary Diversity (September 2024)
Symposium on Russophone Literary Diversity (September 2024)
Funded by the BRIDGE Seed Fund for collaboration between the University of Birmingham in the UK, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the USA.
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, decolonising and decentring approaches to the study of Russophone literature and culture have become increasingly urgent tasks. This symposium seeks to advance these efforts by examining texts by minoritized Russophone authors, including those who are ‘writing back’ from regions formerly colonized by Russia and those who ended up living in exile abroad.
Programme
7 September 2024
9.15-9.30 Welcome and Housekeeping
9.30-10.45 Keynote speaker: Evgeny Shtorn,the University of Helsinki, Finland, Refugee Chronicle
10.45-11.00 Coffee break
11.00-12.30 Panel 1: Post-Soviet Russophone Literature in the Caucasus
- Elena Chkhaidze, Ruhr University, Germany, ‘Location, Time, Language: Post-Soviet Russophone Literature in Georgia’
- Benjamin Sutcliffe, Miami University, USA, ‘Country of the Soul or Occupied Territory: Russophone Authors and the Conflict in Abkhazia’
- Laura Wilson, University of Manchester, UK, ‘Gender Identities and Responses to Russian Colonialism in Alisa Ganieva’s Bride and Groom’
12.30-13.30 Lunch
13.30 - 14.00 Hovhannes Aznauryan, an Armenian Russophone author, reading from two short stories ‘За сто тысяч лет до взрыва Бетельгейзе’ (Druzhba narodov, 10, 2022); and ‘Эта осень’ (Literaturnaia Armenia, 1, 2024)
14.00 – 15.00 Panel 2: Ukrainian Russophone Literature
- Lyudmila Parts, McGill University, ‘“A Russian-Language Poet under Russia’s Bombs”: Ukrainian Russophone Poetry of Witnessing’
- Olha Khometa, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, ‘Reclaiming Ukrainian Jewish Russophone Literature of the Twentieth Century: The Case of Eduard Bagritskii and His Poem The Lay of Opanas’ (ONLINE)
15.00 - 15.15 Coffee Break
15.15 – 16.15 Panel 3: Post-Soviet Russophone Literature in Central Asia
- Azhar Dyussekenova, the University of Michigan, USA, ‘Queer Russophone Writing from Central Asia and Its Ecocritical Perspective on the Steppe and Other Native Landscapes’ (online)
- Anara Alipbayeva, Al-Farabi University, Kazakhstan, ‘The “Woman-Hearthbreaker” in Rollan Seisenbayev’s Prose: Unveiling Russian Colonial Impact on Kazakh society’ (online)
16.15-16.30 Break
16.30-17.30 Panel 4: Belarusian Russophone Literature
- Jenya Mironava, Harvard University, USA, ‘Neither Here Nor There: Belarusian Russophone Literature as a “Minor” Literature’
- Simon Lewis, University of Bremen, Germany, ‘Literary Polyphony in Belarus: Multilingualism and Metadiscourse’
8 September 2024
9.15-10.30 Keynote speaker: Dirk Uffelmann, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany, ‘Post Printum: The Translocalization of Post-2022 Russophone Poetry’
10.30-10.45 Coffee break
10.45-11.45 Panel 1: Embodied Geopolitics and Travel
- Irina Kuznetsova, University of Birmingham, UK, ‘Embodied Geopolitics and Forced Displacement: Cultural and Feminist Geographies of Literature on Russia’s War in Ukraine’
- Maria Whittle, UC Berkeley, ‘Searching for Home in the Air: Center-Periphery Dynamics in Siberian Aviation Fiction’
11.45-13.15 Panel 2: Mobility and Hybridity in Russophone Literature
- George Gasyna, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, ‘Watch and Listen and Remain Silent’: Demystifying the Orientalist Gaze in Mariusz Wilk’s “North Sea Wolf Journal” Trilogy’
- Liana Goletiani, University of Bergamo, Italy, ‘Гибридизация в романе Михаила Старицкого «Молодость Мазепы»: формы и функции’
- Natasha Rulyova, University of Birmingham, UK, ‘“Maia tvaia neponimait”: Hybridity and Misunderstanding in Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway and The Underground’
13.15-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.45 Panel 3: Multilingualism and Interlingualism
- Olga Kenton, University of Birmingham, UK, ‘Beyond the Mother Tongue: Translingual and Exophonic Writing in Zinovy Zinik’s Mind the Gap and Lara Vapnyar’s Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love’
- Brett Donohoe, Amherst College, USA, ‘To Russian and Back Again: Linguistic Mobility in the Margins’
- Isobel Palmer, University of Birmingham, USA, “’no replacements found”: Multilingual Memory in the Work of Russophone Uyghur poet Ramil Niyazov-Adyldzhyan’
15.45 – 16.00 Coffee break
16.00 - 16.30 Mini-Panel: Literary Storymaps
- Chloe Coulthard, Geography, the University of Birmingham, ‘Dagestan’s Diversity in Alisa Ganieva’s Novels’
- Chris Crowson, Modern Languages, the University of Birmingham, ‘Holodomor in Literature’
16.30-16.45 Concluding remarks, further plans