the importance of silenced peoples
The Soviet Union used to be called the prison house of nations. After its collapse, some, like Georgia, Lithuania or Estonia, gained political independence and the right of autonomous cultural expression, other, like Chechnya, became traumatised losers of genocidal wars. As the example of Ukraine indicates, the independence once obtained may also be put under a blood-red interrogation mark.
To the Western eye, those nations often remain invisible and inaudible, muffled by Russia, dwarfed by its cultural supremacy. Yet studying those silenced peoples is more than an act of justice. Both Eastern Europe as a part of the oppressive structures of the former Warsaw Pact, Caucasus, and the Central Asia constantly reinvent their past, present, and future through original literature. It has never been put into the limelight through influential current of scholarship that might be compared to the postcolonial school. For a long time, it was not clear to what degree or under which conditions the postcolonial tools could be applied to the post-Soviet realities. One of the few authors who reflected on such problems was a Polish-American scholar Ewa Thompson. Yet a significant part of this enormous field remains unexplored, almost untouched by researchers. The majority of those who ever care to study Slavic languages and literatures find sufficient thrill in the main, dominant strands of Russian culture, in its Pushkins, Tolstoys, and Akunins. Nonetheless, the real life lies beneath, in the oppressed layers of nations without a history, small ethnic groups, peoples lost in the vast, indefinite space between Fergana Valley and Kamchatka, those whose languages no one understands, and who refuse (or not) to communicate with the world through Russian.
Although I have been born almost at Europe's farthest frontier, that post-Soviet world appears to me as dark, full of ominous signs, unnamed dangers, monsters lurking at the very bottom of the mental formation of apparently decent people. Its literature speaks of trauma and catastrophe, and worse, of stagnant survival. Not a pleasant kind of reading, one might say, yet essential.
To the Western eye, those nations often remain invisible and inaudible, muffled by Russia, dwarfed by its cultural supremacy. Yet studying those silenced peoples is more than an act of justice. Both Eastern Europe as a part of the oppressive structures of the former Warsaw Pact, Caucasus, and the Central Asia constantly reinvent their past, present, and future through original literature. It has never been put into the limelight through influential current of scholarship that might be compared to the postcolonial school. For a long time, it was not clear to what degree or under which conditions the postcolonial tools could be applied to the post-Soviet realities. One of the few authors who reflected on such problems was a Polish-American scholar Ewa Thompson. Yet a significant part of this enormous field remains unexplored, almost untouched by researchers. The majority of those who ever care to study Slavic languages and literatures find sufficient thrill in the main, dominant strands of Russian culture, in its Pushkins, Tolstoys, and Akunins. Nonetheless, the real life lies beneath, in the oppressed layers of nations without a history, small ethnic groups, peoples lost in the vast, indefinite space between Fergana Valley and Kamchatka, those whose languages no one understands, and who refuse (or not) to communicate with the world through Russian.
Although I have been born almost at Europe's farthest frontier, that post-Soviet world appears to me as dark, full of ominous signs, unnamed dangers, monsters lurking at the very bottom of the mental formation of apparently decent people. Its literature speaks of trauma and catastrophe, and worse, of stagnant survival. Not a pleasant kind of reading, one might say, yet essential.
selected essays in East European & post-Soviet literatures
Speaking of silenced disasters. Youth, History and death in Dato Turashvili's Flight from the USSR and Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea
[in progress]
The article establishes a comparative reading of two novels thematising catastrophes: Dato Turashvili's Flight from the USSR (2008) and Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea (2016). Both texts revisit historical events in which lost lives, initially placed beyond the Butlerian “frames of war”, had been treated as unworthy of grief. The parallel reading focuses on the elemental dimension of History depicted in the analysed texts, as well as the affective responses of young protagonists confronted with violence and oppression. Yet another common denominator is the trans-peripheral vision, accentuating solidarity between the peoples oppressed by the Soviet Union, such as Georgia and the Baltic countries. Finally, both novels sketch visions of resilience in confrontation with the catastrophe, even if such an attitude may cross the frontier of delusion, proclaiming the triumph of dream over the reality. The common aim of the analysed writers is to speak of death to young readers and to make them aware of the constant presence of elemental, ineluctable History, depicted as a suspended menace that looms over individual destinies.
The article establishes a comparative reading of two novels thematising catastrophes: Dato Turashvili's Flight from the USSR (2008) and Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea (2016). Both texts revisit historical events in which lost lives, initially placed beyond the Butlerian “frames of war”, had been treated as unworthy of grief. The parallel reading focuses on the elemental dimension of History depicted in the analysed texts, as well as the affective responses of young protagonists confronted with violence and oppression. Yet another common denominator is the trans-peripheral vision, accentuating solidarity between the peoples oppressed by the Soviet Union, such as Georgia and the Baltic countries. Finally, both novels sketch visions of resilience in confrontation with the catastrophe, even if such an attitude may cross the frontier of delusion, proclaiming the triumph of dream over the reality. The common aim of the analysed writers is to speak of death to young readers and to make them aware of the constant presence of elemental, ineluctable History, depicted as a suspended menace that looms over individual destinies.
