Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020 ed. by Maria Rubins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020 ed. by Maria Rubins Yuri Leving Rubins, Maria (ed). Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020. FRINGE. UCL Press, London, 2021. xiii + 264 pp. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. £45.00; £25.00; free open access e-book. This collection, edited by Maria Rubins and published in UCL’s FRINGE series (an acronym standing for Fluidity, Resistance, Invisibility, Neutrality, Grey zones and Elusiveness), is the result of a collective project that began as a workshop on the meaning and status of Russian diasporic literature. It approaches conceptions of the Russian-language literary diaspora over the past hundred years, ‘with an emphasis on working “up” from particular texts and case studies rather than “down” from preconceived models of diasporic literature’ (p. xi), and unfolds in four parts. Part one consists of an introduction by the volume’s editor, who discusses conceptual territories of ‘diaspora’. As Maria Rubins explains, for the purposes of the present project, the contributors chose ‘diaspora’ as an umbrella category embracing various modalities of Russian ‘extra-territorial existence’, including exile, emigration, cross-border migration and russophone enclaves in the ex-Soviet republics. This is prompted by the plasticity of the very Greek word ‘diaspora’, which designates both ‘scattering’ and ‘sowing seeds’, and enables the balancing of such contrasting ideas as banishment, punishment and exile, on the one hand, and settling, establishing communities in new locations and ultimate redemption, on the other. Such a broad understanding of the diasporic mission allows the book’s nine authors to present various case studies that are grouped mostly around three key themes: performativity, language and space(s). Parts two and three of the book each consist of two chapters, focusing on performing diasporic identities in transnational contexts and on defining evolutionary trajectories (adaptation, ‘interbreeding’ and transcultural polyglossia) respectively. Andreas Schönle writes about exile as emotional, moral and ideological ambivalence, taking Nikolai Turgenev as his case, which ‘reveals several fault lines or pressure points in the performance of exile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Russia’ (p. 53). Pamela Davidson extrapolates this line of inquiry to include Bunin, Nabokov and Viacheslav Ivanov, and questions how émigré authors related to the well-established national tradition of Russian literature as prophecy after the Revolution [End Page 539] when they found themselves displaced from their homeland. To varying degrees, Nabokov remains the focus of the next two chapters. Adrian Wanner considers the self-translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, while David Bethea traces the little-known story of Nabokov’s awareness of the work of the émigré scientist, Theodosius Dobzhanskii (1900–75). Dobzhanskii’s first major book, Genetics and the Origin of Species, appeared in 1937 (when Nabokov was completing The Gift), and was considered ‘a world leader in refining the concept of species, which became one of Nabokov’s keenest interests once he joined the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard in 1941’ (p. 143). Bethea even mentions that Nabokov corresponded with Dobzhanskii in 1954 (one wishes that he could have provided a few more details about this undoubtedly intriguing correspondence). Part four, ‘Imagined Spaces of Unity and Difference’, is the longest in the volume with three chapters by Katharine Hodgson, Mark Lipovetsky and Kevin M. F. Platt. Katharine Hodgson examines the role of the poetry anthology in the construction of a diasporic canon and, more specifically, how poetry anthologies function as a way of shaping a diasporic canon, both in the diaspora and in the metropolis. As she argues, anthologies compiled principally for readers inside Russia, and those aimed at readers in the diaspora, differ in their presentation of diasporic poetry (p. 166). To prove this point, Hodgson compares editions that have appeared since 1991, attempting to establish whether they are shaped ‘principally by a discourse of repatriation which presents diaspora poetry as an expression of a national tradition’, or whether there are ‘signs of a revised understanding of poetry written in Russian which is connected to, but extends beyond, the national’ (p. 167). A more radical and methodologically innovative question is raised by Mark Lipovetsky in a chapter tellingly titled, ‘Is there Room for Diaspora Literature in the Internet Age?’. Lipovetsky...