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“Russian Literature of the Anthropocene” is live!9 peer reviewed articles from some of the very best.
To celebrate, I thought I would digest the volume with a thread, one tweet per article as a bit of a guide for the curious.
1/ In the intro, Elena and I a) put the Anthropocene “in place” in Russian scientific, environmental, and literary history, b) suggest paths for future research, and c) articulate our working definition of the epoch. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv15Cs5hNac
2/ Colleen McQuillen ( @russianprof) integrates the ecological into Decadent, fin-de-siecle claims about civilizational collapse by drawing on the Russian Cosmist Nikolai Fedorov’s response to the 1891 famine. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv15Cs5hNao
3/ Elena Fratto traces the narrative structure Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” to developments in early XXth endocrinology. These developments centred the narrative agency of organs (that cross species boundaries and destabilize ‘the human’). https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv_6wuczxzI
4) Henrietta Mondry unpacks Soviet canine futurity to reveal "either heterotopian places of resistance, alterity and escape from anthropogenic ecological crises, or projected dystopian futurity based on the return of the oppressive methods of the past.” https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv15Cs5hNa-
5) I read Nabokov’s butterflies w/ Leanne Simpson’s story of eel migration to offer an alternative to the global and extractive logics of the Anthropocene based on more-than-human imagined communities, sustained by relationships of responsibility. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv15Cs5hNbB
6) Isabel Lane offers nuclear waste as a non-human source of narrative structure on both sides of the iron curtain in her reading of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv15Cs5hNbN
7) Anindita Banerjee finds in Aitmatov's work “a novel spacetime in which deep histories of colonial violence and dislocation intersect with futuristic arcs of planetary devastation," centring the Central Asian periphery. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv15Cs5hNbZ
8) Rounding out our nuclear trilogy, Jane Coslow considers human relationships to the non-human in the wake of social and environmental upheaval in the works of a theologian, a photographer, and a novelist-documentarian (Svetlana Alexeevich!). https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv15Cs5hNbl
9) Finally, Tom Newlin traces the development of a “geological affect” in Tolstoy, Lomonosov and others to XVIII and XIX public writing (and visuals) in the emerging field of geology. https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bauv15Cs5hNbr
There’s no filler. I love all of these articles (and all of these people).
I’d also like to thank @RussLiterature, @ellenrutten, and @MarijetaBozovic for the opportunity to do 200 pages of something a little different within Slavic. Their encouragement, support and editorial work were vital to the realization of this project.
