Poetic Canons, Cultural Memory and Russian National Identity after 1991

The collapse of the Soviet Union forced Russia to engage in a process of nation building. This involved a reassessment of the past, both historical and cultural, and how it should be remembered. The publication of previously barely known underground and émigré literary works presented an opportunity to reappraise «official» Soviet literature and re-evaluate twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole.

This book explores changes to the poetry canon an instrument for maintaining individual and collective memory to show how cultural memory has informed the evolution of post-Soviet Russian identity. It examines how concerns over identity are shaping the canon, and in which directions, and analyses the interrelationship between national identity (whether ethnic, imperial, or civic) and attempts to revise the canon. This study situates the discussion of national identity within the cultural field and in the context of canon formation as a complex expression of aesthetic, political, and institutional factors. It encompasses a period of far-reaching upheaval in Russia and reveals the tension between a desire for change and a longing for stability that was expressed by attempts to reshape the literary canon and, by doing so, to create a new twentieth-century past and the foundations of a new identity for the nation.

Autorentext

Katharine Hodgson is Professor in Russian at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on poetry of the Soviet era, including the work of Leningrad poet Ol'ga Berggol'ts and poetry of the Second World War. Alexandra Smith is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include literary and film theory, critical theory, Russian literature of the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, intermediality and the history of ideas. She is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006). This book is the result of a project led by the authors and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which explored the way attitudes towards the cultural legacy of the USSR have evolved since 1991. A co-edited book (with Joanne Shelton), Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon, appeared in 2017.

Inhalt

CONTENTS: Katharine Hodgson: The Appeal of Empire and the Attempt to Propose a New Nationalist Canon Katharine Hodgson: The Canon of War Poetry and Commemoration, 19952010 Katharine Hodgson: Village Poetry: Reinventing a Lost World Alexandra Smith: Russian Gulag Poetry and its Reception: Marginalizing National Trauma Alexandra Smith: Rediscovering the Religious and Elegiac Roots of Russian Lyric Poetry: Soviet Underground Poets as Anna Akhmatova's Heirs Alexandra Smith: The Pushkin Myth in New Contexts: Post-Soviet Rewriting of the Tradition Alexandra Smith: Post-Soviet Parody, Ironic Musings, and a New Poetic Canon Alexandra Smith/Katharine Hodgson: Conclusion: Russian National Identity between Triumphant and Traumatic Memory.