Slobin, Greta N. Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora (1919–1939) (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 524 Slobin, Greta N. Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora (1919–1939). The Real Twentieth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2013. 256 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bio-bibliography. Bibliography. Index. $59.00. This monograph, regrettably left unfinished, was completed and edited by Katerina Clark, Nancy Condee, Dan Slobin and Mark Slobin, who discussed the project with Greta Slobin in detail prior to her untimely passing. The book contains a foreword by Galin Tihanov, an introduction, four parts and the author’s bio-bibliography. Slobin focuses mostly on the Russian diaspora of the interwar decades, although she concludes the epilogue chapters with references to the postwar reception of the First Wave and comments briefly on the ‘homecoming’ of émigré literature during the post-Soviet period. Framed by several critical models, including neocolonial, the book is rich in observations on the nexus between the national canon, exile and modernism. Slobin’s main interest lies with such authors as Remizov (a writer who was the subject of her earlier monograph and a series of other publications), Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Bunin and Nabokov, and the main research question she pursues is how Russian émigré literature contributed to articulating national identity. Presenting her book as a study of Russian nationalism, she highlights linguistic and cultural continuity as guiding principles of the diaspora, and proceeds to examine an alternative vision of the nation constructed in exile as opposed to the Soviet discourse and in conversation with the intellectual traditions of European host countries and transnational cultural networks more broadly. With the exception of Nabokov, who figures to some extent as a foil for more conservative members of Russia Abroad, Slobin chooses examples that illuminate the smooth transition between the ‘classical’ Russian canon to exile writing, and proceeds to discuss subsequent modifications. Before launching into several case studies showing how selected émigré writers adapted pre-Revolutionary modernism, Slobin proposes her own periodization of First Wave literature. Drawing on Gleb Struve’s chronology introduced in his pioneering history of Russian émigré literature (1919–24 — establishmentand1925–1939—self-definition),shesub-dividesthesecondstage into two distinct periods. She defines the years 1925–29 as a period of intense border crossings, cultural collaborations, competition and conflict, and the following decade (1930–39) as the time of self-affirmation and consolidation of the diaspora. One of the most engaging parts of the monograph is Slobin’s exploration of the role and semantics of memory in the context of exiles’ recollections of their native cities. In particular, she considers how bilocality and bilinguism shaped REVIEWS 525 the workings of visual memory and the representation of a place. Mapping imaginative topographies of the Western metropolis (in Khodasevich, Bunin, Teffi and Nabokov), Slobin demonstrates both the potential of the traditional literary mythologies of Russian cities for émigré writing and the experimental move in some texts beyond the national framework into interwar European modernism, where memory and the urban were among the central topoi. Passing on to the émigré reinterpretation of Russian canonical figures, Slobin selects Gogol´, Dostoevskii and Turgenev. She profitably juxtaposes Remizov’s and Belyi’s attempts to salvage Gogol´’s legacy from Belinskii’s recalcitrant realistic paradigm. Her references to the polemic sparked on both sides of the border by Meierkhol´d’s experimental 1926 production of The Inspector General is extremely well taken here, and one only regrets its brevity and the omission from consideration of Viacheslav Ivanov’s essay, ‘Revizor Gogolia i komediia Aristofana’ (1926), which was an important contribution to the debate from the ‘émigré camp’. Although Dostoevskii has been a locus classicus of émigré scholarship for decades, Slobin identifies an important and interesting angle, focusing less on the ‘influence’ of Dostoevskii on diaspora writing as on the evolution of the Dostoevskii myth. Nabokov-Sirin’s engagement with Dostoevskii naturally becomes her test case as she explores the cultural function of the myth of the writer and literary parody as an essential stage in the process of literary evolution. She adds another dimension by considering how the Western perception of Dostoevskii as the prophet of the Russian Revolution and the bearer of Russian mystical nationalism affected émigrés’ attitudes. As opposed to Dostoevskii and, indeed...