Dobrenko, Evgeny Lipovetsky, Mark Russian Literature since 1991 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 553 There is little to criticize about this treasure trove of informative material, but I do have three minor reservations. First, although the level of scholarship in most of the essays is admirable, only ten of the volume’s nineteen essays are original contributions. The rest are reprints of previously published articles (by Gaidenko, Nethercott, Novikov, Molchanov, Shchedrina, Granin, Obolevitch, Plašienková and Opalev). And, in some of the new essays, the texts borrow heavily from previously published material. This unfortunately diminishes the value of the volume’s scholarly endeavour, although the argument could convincingly be made that this kind of collection should aim at thoroughness rather than novelty. Second, metaphysics is underrepresented in the first part, considering that it was supposed to be concerned with both the theory of knowledge and metaphysics in presumably equal proportion. Third, the bibliography is incomplete and would have benefited from thorough proofreading by someone acquainted with French. Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University Frederic Tremblay and Sofia University ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’ Dobrenko, Evgeny and Lipovetsky, Mark (eds). Russian Literature since 1991. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2015. x + 308 pp. Notes. Works cited. Index. £64.99. In their introduction to this comprehensive volume, the ‘first attempt at an integral study of Russian literature after the breakup of the Soviet Union’ (p. 18), Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky posit that ‘the time from the 1990s onward is unique in the history of Russian culture: it is the only lengthy interval in which Russian literature developed in the complete absence of censorship of both the political and moral varieties’ (p. 1). Thus they set the stage for subsequent examination of texts produced during the approximately two-and-a-half decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse. With an approach framed by the editors’ assertion that the post-Soviet period has been one in which the place of literature in Russian culture has been interrogated and reestablished , the authors of the volume’s fourteen chapters persistently locate continuities and disruptions within the Russian literary tradition and link them to representative works. In presenting the volume’s central aim, Dobrenko and Lipovetsky argue that two major strands of post-Soviet writing (namely, mainstream and minority) engage in a shared ‘search for languages and strategies for the self-realization of personality that could restore to the subject agency as an individual participant of history and not as a particle of the “collective body”’ (p. 13). The essays SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 554 collected here were developed from papers delivered at ‘After Censorship, Before Freedom: Mapping Contemporary Russian Literature’, a workshop held at Princeton University in 2014. Each chapter provides an overview of the trend in question, followed by cultural contextualization and illustration of the trend’s salient features through close readings of several texts. The volume’s first five chapters focus on mainstream literature. Dobrenko begins by exploring the legacy of Socialist Realism and examining the changing relationship to the Soviet past, maintaining that ‘reworking the Soviet past’ has engendered a fundamentally new literature in the post-Soviet period (p. 21). Similarly, Serguei Oushakine’s contribution argues that though the contemporary ideological novel contrasts sharply with late Soviet and early post-Soviet postmodern literature, it is a new form rather than a mere recapitulation of previously established genre conventions and Socialist Realist forms. Chapters four to six examine the multifaceted approaches to historical trauma in post-Soviet Russian literature. Kevin M. F. Platt presents examples of the historical novel as texts that form ‘prosthetic narratives of the Russian past’ in their attempt to compensate for historical loss and the fiction of ‘history’s wholeness’ (p. 69). Eliot Borenstein’s chapter next establishes a typology of texts focused on dystopia and apocalypse, with Chernobyl as a crucial catastrophic phenomenon giving rise to subsequent literary works in this vein. Examining the post-Soviet uncanny and its treatment in literature, Alexander Etkind writes about magical historicism as a phenomenon that is related to, yet must be differentiated from, magical realism. Ilya Kalinin’s chapter takes petropoetics as its subject, identifying the ‘oil text’ as a unifying category within mainstream literature that emerged in the 2000s and which includes...