“The Old Country.” “A terrible country.” “They’re Russian. Well, not really Russian, they’re from the former Soviet Union.” Casual conversations among your peers at Rutgers often bring up lines likes this, because for over a hundred years, wave after wave of Russian Imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet émigrés have ended up in North America, Europe and Israel. Throughout the twentieth century, these communities have counted in the millions. They have cardinally shaped culture, as in the case of New York, Hollywood, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere. They have transformed national political discourse, through the impact of prominent figures like Trotsky, Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and Isaiah Berlin. And in the case of the post-Soviet aliyah to Israel in the 1990s they have changed electoral politics. What are the lifeworlds of the Russian-speaking émigrés? What certainties do they seem to agree on when they speak about their origins? To what degree do they speak on behalf of “Russia,” even as so many of them originate from its many imperial peripheries? What truths do the Russophone émigrés think they know about “Western” culture and politics, and what do we ourselves presume to know about such things? To get at these questions, we will read texts, study artworks and watch films by several generations of Russophone émigrés to France, Germany, Italy, Israel, the United States and Canada. We will carefully learn about the very different national cultures in which such artifacts have been produced and have fallen on ready ears. We will examine works originally written in Russian, as in the case of Nina Berberova, Sergei Dovlatov and Eduard Limonov, as well as texts and films in English, German, French, Italian and Hebrew, by émigrés like Vladimir Nabokov, Alina Bronsky, Andrei Tarkovsky, and most recently Kirill Serebrennikov, among many others.
Our class will not proceed through the traditional chronology of Imperial, Soviet, vs Post-Soviet emigration. Instead, we will tackle the global Russian-speaking émigré community by examining it within the kaleidoscope of nations in which they have ended up, paying close attention to internal chronologies and internal conversations within each culture, and in that way learning several ways of telling the story of Russophone emigration in the twentieth century. Your presentations and paper-writing assignments will grow out of this comparative framework, as you consider what, for example, European-based émigré texts might indirectly reveal about American and Israeli culture, and vice versa. All readings and class discussions in English.
About Professor Khazanov
Pavel Khazanov does research on late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture, focusing especially on the evolution of the ideology of the Russian intelligentsia between the 1950s ‘Thaw’ and the present. Primarily, he studies how political ideals such as socialism, liberalism and nationalism were interpreted among Russian elites and their audiences, and how these ideas influenced literature, criticism, film and art of the 20th and the 21st century.
Khazanov is also interested in the forging of Soviet discourse on Stalinist and post-Stalinist subjectivity in the works of such authors and critics as Andrei Platonov, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Lifshitz, and Vladimir Sappak. His current book project, A Russia That We Have Lost: The History and Politics of Recalling the Pre-Soviet Past examines how inventive recollections of the pre-Revolutionary past allowed late Soviet intellectual leaders and their audiences to define themselves and articulate a political horizon that ended up shaping the post-Soviet era.