Category: Scholarship

Books for Review, 2022

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

Punctured Lines is looking for reviews of the following recent and upcoming titles. Reviewers should have some expertise in terms of their chosen work, engaging substantively with its themes, structure, and techniques and using direct citation to back up claims. Each piece we receive for review undergoes a rigorous editing process, and we will provide potential reviewers with the guidelines. If you are interested in reviewing a work not on the list but that fits our overall themes of feminism, LGBT, diaspora, decolonialism, etc., please let us know. Thank you, and we look forward to working with you. Email us at PuncturedLines [at] gmail [dot] com.

We especially welcome reviews of Ukrainian titles.

Fiction:

Alina Adams, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region (History Through Fiction, 2022)***

Mark Andryczyk, editor, Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965 (Penguin, 2022)***

Claude Anet, Ariane, A Young Russian Girl, translated by Mitchell Abidor (NYRB, 2023)

Ivan Baidak, (In)visible (Guernica World Editions, 2022)

Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega, editors and translators, Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022)***

Yevgenia Belorusets, Lucky Breaks, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky (New Directions, 2022)***

Darya Bobyleva, The Village at the Edge of Noon, translated by Ilona Chavasse (Angry Robot, 2023)

Liliana Corobca, The Censor’s Notebook, translated by Monica Cure (Seven Stories Press, 2022)

Tetyana Denford, The Child of Ukraine (Bookouture, 2022)

Tamara Duda, Daughter, translated by Daisy Gibbons (Mosaic Press, 2022)

Alisa Ganieva, Offended Sensibilities, translated by Carol Apollonio (Deep Vellum, 2022)

Alla Gorbunova, It’s the End of the World, My Love, translated by Elina Alter (Deep Vellum, 2022)

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, What Isn’t Remembered (The University of Nebraska Press, 2021) and The Orchard (Ballantine Books, 2022)

Elena Gorokhova, A Train to Moscow (Lake Union Publishing, 2022)

Maylis de Kerangal, Eastbound, translated by Jessica Moore (Archipelago, 2023)

Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Seagull Books, 2022)

Ali Kinsella, Zenia Tompkins, and Ross Ufberg, editors, Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories (Deep Vellum, 2022)

Lana Kortchik, The Countess of the Revolution (HQ Digital, 2023)

Mary Kuryla, Away to Stay (Regal House Publishing, 2022)

Maja Lunde, The Last Wild Horses, translated by Diane Oatley (HarperVia, 2023)

Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy (Catapult, 2023)***

Rae Meadows, Winterland (Henry Holt and Co, 2022)

Nataliya Meshchaninova, Stories of a Life, translated by Fiona Bell (Deep Vellum, 2022)

Irène Némirovsky, Master of Souls, translated by Sandra Smith (Kales Press, 2022)

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes, translated by Marian Schwartz (Deep Vellum 2023)***

Natasha Pulley, The Half Life of Valery K (Bloomsbury, 2022)

Gabriella Saab, Daughters of Victory (William Morrow, 2023)

Zanna Sloniowska, The House with the Stained-Glass Window, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Quercus Publishing, 2022)

Zhanna Slor, At the End of the World, Turn Left (Agora Books, 2021)

Yana Vagner, To the Lake, translated by Maria Wiltshire (Deep Vellum, 2023)

Yuliya Yakovleva, Punishment of a Hunter, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (Pushkin Vertigo, 2021)***

Kira Yarmysh, The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3, translated by Arch Tait (Grove Press, 2023)***

Nonfiction:

Rustam Alexander, Red Closet: The Untold Story of Gay Oppression in the USSR (Manchester UP, 2023)***

Charlotte Arpadi Baum, Hate Vanquished, Lives Remembered: A Survivor’s Story (Library of the Holocaust, 2022)

Victoria Belim, The Rooster House: My Ukrainian Family Story (Abrams Press, 2023)

Paula J. Birnbaum, Sculpting a Life: Chana Orloff between Paris and Tel Aviv (Brandeis UP, 2023)

Rosalind P. Blakesley, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Lund Humphries, 2023)

Lisa Brahin, Tears Over Russia: A Search for Family and the Legacy of Ukraine’s Pogroms (Pegasus Books, 2022)

Judith Chazin-Bennahum, Ida Rubinstein: Revolutionary Dancer, Actress, and Impresario (SUNY Press, 2022)

Donna Chmara, Surviving Genocide: Personal Recollections (Winged Hussar Publishing, 2022)

Verena Dohrn, The Kahans from Baku: A Family Saga (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

Suzanna Eibuszyc, Memory Is Our Home: Loss and Remembering: Three generations in Poland and Russia 1917-1960s (ibidem Press, 2022)

Inna Faliks, Weight in the Fingertips (Backbeat 2023)

Maksim Goldenshteyn, So They Remember: A Jewish Family’s Story of Surviving the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine (OUP, 2021)

Lars Horn, Voice of the Fish (Graywolf Press, 2022)

Marina Jarre, Return to Latvia, translated by Ann Goldstein (New Vessel Press, 2023)***

Andrew D. Kaufman, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky (Riverhead Books, 2021)

Olesya Khromeychuk, A Loss: The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister (Columbia UP, 2021)***

Naira Kuzmich, In Everything I See Your Hand (University of New Orleans Press, 2022)

Risa Levitt, Memory Identity Encounter: Ukrainian Jewish Journey (Hirmer Publishers, 2023)

Katrina Maloney and Patricia M. Maloney (editors), Dearest Ones at Home and With A Heart Full of Love: Clara Taylor’s Letters from Russia (She Writes Press, 2014 and 2022)

Oksana Masters, The Hard Parts: A Memoir of Courage and Triumph, with contributions by Cassidy Randall (Scribner, 2023)

Shane O’Rourke, Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, Princess Isabel and the Ending of Servile Labour in Russia and Brazil (Anthem Press, 2023)

Sara Raza, Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion (Black Dog Press, 2022)***

Natasha Lance Rogoff, Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022)***

Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque (Catapult, 2022)

Samira Saramo, Building That Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans (University of Toronto Press, 2022)

Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (HarperPress, 2022)

Yeva Skalietska, You Don’t Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine (Union Square & Co, 2022)***

Iroida Wynnyckyj, compiler and editor, The Extraordinary Lives of Ukrainian-Canadian Women: Oral Histories of the Twentieth Century (University of Alberta Press, 2022)

Poetry:

Polina Barskova, editor, Verses on the Vanguard: Poetry & Dialogue from Contemporary Russia (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2021)***

Natalka Bilotserkivets, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow, translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky (Lost Horse Press, 2021)

Julia Cimafiejeva, Motherfield: Poems & Belarusian Protest Diary, translated by Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib (Phoneme Media, 2022)

Sarah Coolidge, editor, This Is Us Losing Count: Eight Russian Poets (Two Lines Press, 2022)***

Boris Dralyuk, My Hollywood & Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022)

Annie Finch, coordinator, An Exaltation of Goddesses, includes a long poem by Anna Halberstadt (Poetry Witch Press, 2021)

Zuzanna Ginczanka, Firebird, translated by Alissa Valles (NYRB Poets, 2022)

Ostap Kin and John Hennessy, editors, Babyn Yar: Ukranian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2023)

Ludmila and Boris Khersonsky, The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear, translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky (Lost Horse Press, 2022)

Marianna Kiyanovska, The Voices of Babyn Yar, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature, 2022)***

Mikhail Kuzmin, New Hull, translated by Simona Schneider (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022)

Irina Mashinski, The Naked World (MadHat Press, 2022)

Ksenia Rychtycka, A Sky Full of Wings (Finishing Line Press, 2021)

Maria Stepanova, The Voice Over: Poems and Essays, edited by Irina Shevelenko (Columbia UP, 2021)***

Marina Tsvetaeva, After Life, translated by Mary Jane White (Adelaide Books, 2021)

Lyuba Yakimchuk, Apricots of Donbas, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, and Svetlana Lavochkina (Lost Horse Press, 2021)

Scholarship:

Anna Aydinyan, Formalists against Imperialism: The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar and Russian Orientalism (University of Toronto Press, 2022)

Katerina Capková and Kamil Kijek, editors, Jewish Lives Under Communism: New Perspectives (Rutgers UP, 2022)

Diana Cucuz, Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR (University of Toronto Press, 2022)***

David Featherstone and Christian Høgsbjerg, editors, The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic (Racism, Resistance and Social Change) (Manchester UP, 2021)

Claire P. Kaiser, Georgian and Soviet: Entitled Nationhood and the Specter of Stalin in the Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2023)

Peter J. Kalliney, The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature (Princeton UP, 2022)

Katya Hokanson, A Woman’s Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia (University of Toronto Press, 2023)

Alessandro Iandolo, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell UP, 2022)

Krista G. Goff, Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2021)

Marina Mogilner, A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness (Harvard UP, 2022)

Sasha Senderovich, How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Harvard UP, 2022)

Tricia Starks, Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR (Northern Illinois UP, 2022)

Kristina Stoeckl, Dmitry Uzlaner, The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars (Fordham UP, 2022)

Oleksandra Tarkhanova, Compulsory Motherhood, Paternalistic State?: Ukrainian Gender Politics and the Subject of Woman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Natalia Telepneva, Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022)

Hélène Thibault and Jean-François Caron, editors, Uyat and the Culture of Shame in Central Asia, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Stephen Velychenko, Joseph Ruane, and Ludmilla Hrynevych, editors, Ireland and Ukraine: Studies in Comparative Imperial and National History (ibidem Press, 2022)

*** Indicates a reviewer has expressed interest in the book.

Virtual Conference on Radiant Maternity in Literature and Culture

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

As readers, feminists, and ourselves parents, we at Punctured Lines are happy to learn that Drs. Muireann Maguire and Eglė Kačkutė are organizing a two-day conference to launch the Slavic and East European Maternal Studies Network. The conference is to take place on January 28 and 29, 2022, and the stellar list of presenters and topics includes our contributor Natalya Sukhonos’s paper on Motherhood, Math, and Posthumous Creativity in Lara Vapnyar’s Russian-American novel Divide Me by Zero. We ran a Q&A with Lara Vapnyar shortly upon the publication of that novel.

Our contributor Svetlana Satchkova will participate in an online discussion on Motherhood, Gender, Translation and Censorship in Eastern European Women’s Writing, and scholar and translator Muireann Maguire will present a paper on Breastfeeding and Female Agency in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel.

The full listing of events is available on the conference’s website. To register, please email SEEMSmaternal @ exeter.ac.uk by January 21st, 2022. The sessions will be conducted in English.

The Scent of Empires: Channel No. 5 and Red Moscow by Karl Schlögel (trans. Jessica Spengler; Polity, 2021), reviewed by Emily Couch

~ Yelena Furman ~ 3 Comments

Punctured Lines is grateful to Emily Couch for her review of Karl Schlögel’s The Scent of Empires: Channel No. 5 and Red Moscow, translated by Jessica Spengler. This book held a particular interest for me because I firmly associate the perfume Red Moscow (Krasnaya Moskva) with my grandmother, who, like many in the Soviet Union, wore this scent. At the same time, I have a memory of standing in a Paris perfumery at the end of my study-abroad program buying a small bottle of Chanel No. 5 to bring back to her as a gift. In one sense, this seems very odd to me, since I can’t remember her wearing perfume in the U.S. and I can’t totally say that I’ve remembered this accurately. But this book and review makes me think I’m right: perhaps my grandmother did like the French perfume because it reminded her of the Soviet one since, as it turns out, there was a connection between them.

Karl Schlögel’s The Scent of Empires: Channel No. 5 and Red Moscow (translated by Jessica Spengler), Review by Emily Couch

I wanted to love The Scent of Empires.  When I happened upon it in the flagship Waterstones store in London, I felt a burst of excitement.  Here was a book that united many of my personal passions: Russian and French history, fashion, design. The blurb announced that the reader should expect “the interconnected histories of two of the world’s most celebrated perfumes” and “a surprising story of power, intrigue and betrayal.” Yet, unlike the two headline perfumes whose boldly designed bottles represented the revolutionary nature of the scent within, Schlögel’s book does not live up to the promise of its packaging. Despite its diminutive length, The Scent of Empires is not an easy book to distil because it lacks a single essence.

In Chapter 1, Schlögel describes the genesis of the two related scents, charting the trajectories of Ernest Beaux and Auguste Ippolitovich Michel – French perfumers who made their careers in Imperial Russia working for Rallet & Co., purveyor of perfume to the imperial court. Beaux remained with Rallet & Co. until the Russian Revolution in 1917, when he returned to his native France, whereas Michel moved to Brocard, a rival Russian perfumery (which, upon its nationalization became Novaya Zarya). In 1912, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, Rallet & Co. released the scent “Bouquet de Napoleon,” and both Beaux and Michel took the formula of the “Bouquet” into their post-revolutionary lives. In Beaux’s hands in France, it became Chanel No. 5; in Michel’s in the Soviet Union, it became Red Moscow.

In Chapter 2 the author takes a theoretical turn, examining the place of scent in Western philosophical thought. The Western attitude towards the olfactory, writes Schlögel, was shaped by the Enlightenment, whose thinkers posited smell as “all that is non-conscious, unconscious, non-rational, irrational, uncontrollable, archaic, dangerous.” Despite this antipathy, however, “we cannot simply catapult ourselves out of the realm of scent. We perceive the world not only with our eyes, but also with our nose.” In Chapter 3, he characterizes the Russian Revolution as an event that not only shattered the social pedestal of the elite, but also their sensory world. The smell of cabbage soup, factories, and overcrowded train carriages “breached the walls of the hermetically sealed and orderly olfactory world of the ancien régime.”  In the tumultuous years of World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the mass social upheaval that these phenomena entailed, the “odour of the front lines and the bivouac, the sweat of factory work, the stench of overcrowded train carriages – it all forces its way into the perfumed and deodorized realm of high culture.”

Chapter 4 examines how Russia and France – the former through revolution and the latter through World War I – experienced radical breaks with their pasts and dramatic leaps into their own forms of modernity, which manifested itself in fashion and material culture. Schlögel demonstrates how this post-war, post-revolutionary tendency was seen in women’s fashion, drawing parallels between Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel and the leading Soviet couturier, Nadezhda Lamanova, whose designs rejected flounces and adornment in favor of bold, clean lines that allowed freedom of movement to the body. Both “stood for a type of fashion that combined taste and quality and was intended to be accessible even to ordinary people.”

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 outline the cultural and political connections between Russia and France both pre-and post-1918. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the movement of people and ideas between France and Russia. The first highlights how pre-war France was a popular destination for Russia’s elite and dissidents alike: “Paris stood alongside Italy as the most important destination for Russian travellers prior to World War I […] Russian colonies sprang up on the Côte d’Azur in Cannes, San Remo, Antibes, and Nice, and on the Atlantic in Biarritz and Deauville.” Meanwhile, “Paris became a place of exile for Russian revolutionaries […] Revolutionary democrats and oppositionists of all stripes turned Paris […] into a locus of anti-tsarist resistance.” In the second, Schlögel shows how, after the revolution, leading French cultural figures such as Christian Dior, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Le Corbusier, visited the Soviet Union, viewing it as “an ally against capitalism and the impending war.” Chapter 7 pays particular attention to Frenchman Auguste Michel’s rehabilitation by the Soviet authorities, one of the “valuable examples of the Soviet state’s successful deployment of the old intelligentsia,” and his attempts to create perfumes – with names like “1 May” and “Palace of Soviets” to embody the new order.

Schlögel dedicates Chapter 8 to the biographies of Coco Chanel (1883-1971) and Polina Zhemchuzhina (1897-1970), elucidating the unexpected parallels in their life trajectories despite their wildly differing social circumstances. While the general contours of Chanel’s career are likely well-known to the Western reader, those of Zhemchuzhina’s are probably less so. “[F]rom the impoverished environs of the Jewish shtetl” in what is now eastern Ukraine, she rose through the Communist Party ranks until she became the People’s Commissar for the Food Industry in 1939. More well-known to history is the man who became her husband – Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. The chapter is born of good intentions, presenting both Chanel and Zhemchuzhina as “iron women” who made their way in a male-dominated world. The vaguely feminist approach to their biographies is, unfortunately, lost in the somewhat contrived points of comparison between two individuals who, as the author himself admits, “were disparate to the point of antagonism.”

Chanel’s biography contains a somewhat disturbing attempt by the author to excuse her well-documented collaboration with the Nazis: “What the documents do not tell us is whether her activities ever caused anyone great personal harm”.  While the book should certainly not attempt to put Chanel on trial for her actions during the occupation, this one-line attempt to brush any criticism of the designer aside is unsettling and detracts from the overall narrative. Schlögel’s account of how the designer used her connections with the Nazi high command to further her business interests – while a well-intentioned attempt to portray her as a strong woman making the best of dire circumstances – is off-putting.  In the same vein, Chapter 9’s jarringly brief reflection on the sensory facet of Soviet and Nazi camps brings an unintentional glibness to these horrifying forms of repression and death. “We have the smell of scorched earth and mass graves,” Schlögel luridly writes, “bodies crammed together in deportation trains, pyres of burning books, the smell of the gas piped into the gas chambers and the smoke rising from the crematoria.”

In Chapters 10, 11, and 12, the author ambitiously attempts to cover the nearly seventy years between Stalin’s death and the present day.  In Chapter 10 he describes the boom in Soviet consumer culture post-1953, which gave rise to the “Golden Age of Soviet perfumery.” Then, he takes a rather unexpected detour – titled “Excursus,” which appears to be sandwiched between the two chapters –into the life of Olga Chekhova, an actress-cum-cosmetics entrepreneur who founded a perfumery in Munich (not to be confused with her aunt, Olga Knipper, Anton Chekhov’s wife). Schlögel devotes Chapter 11, a mere five pages, to the life of Soviet perfumes in the post-Soviet era. The explosive emergence of Western designer brands after the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a “reaction against what some viewed as a foreign invasion [that] was not long in coming. Many set off on a search for the lost time that had taken the scents of the Soviet epoch with it.” The revival of Red Moscow, and the proliferation of old Soviet perfume bottles for sale in makeshift markets, symbolized this nostalgia for the recent past. The final chapter, rather oddly, goes back to the early 20th century and the long-unknown foray of avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich into perfume bottle design. In the early 1910s, the artist who would later go on to create the Black Square designed a bottle for the Brocard fragrance – “Severny (North)” – shaped like a polar bear standing atop an iceberg. The design, writes Schlögel, reflected “the spirit of the times” in which nations scrambled to explore and claim the North Pole, “the last remaining terra incognita.” Despite being the premise of the book, Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow appear as a mere afterthought in the final chapter.

As the above discussion shows, one of the book’s principle flaws is its disjointedness. Instead of a sweeping historical narrative, with the stories of each perfume blended as sublimely as the eponymous scents, Schlögel offers a tale in fits and starts. Just as readers begin to lose themselves in the fascinating, if somewhat hard to follow, origin of the smell that defined two very different societies, they find themselves blown suddenly of course. Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 11, while presenting material of undoubted interest, bear little relation to the story that Schlögel sets out to tell. Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow scarcely feature in these chapters, which make up a substantial portion of the book. His imagined “museum of fragrances,” in which “Krasnaya Moskva, and even Kazimir Malevich’s polar bear on an iceberg, could take their place alongside Chanel No. 5,” is an intriguing flight of fancy, but there is a distinct sense that the two perfumes on which the work is premised are something of an afterthought, thrown haphazardly into the book’s final sentence to close the narrative circle.

The Scent of Empires is a mere 163 pages, not including the reference and index sections. The readers’ senses have been stimulated, but not satisfied. There is a distinct feeling that much of the story remains untold. It is a shame, for example, that Schlögel does not provide greater insight into his research process. In the prologue, he piques the reader’s curiosity by noting that “[w]hen you rove the bazaars of Russian cities and start collecting bottles […] you encounter amateurs everywhere who have turned themselves into experts,” but this tantalizing sentence remains without follow-up. What kind of Soviet citizen wore Red Moscow? What lives did this state-generated commodity lead after it left the laboratory and reached the apartments of the populace? Now that the scent has been “re-booted” for the post-Soviet era, how has its use and meaning changed? These are just some of the questions which Schlögel leads the reader to ponder but which he leaves unanswered.

The book’s fault lies not in the decision to tell these intertwined stories – even if the connections are, at times, a little contrived – but rather in the superficial treatment that Schlögel gives to them. All this being said, this book is worth reading, containing as it does elements to draw in Russianists, Francophiles, and design aficionados alike and encouraging readers to understand an époque that many believe they know so well through an unexpected medium.  The Scent of Empires contains a myriad fascinating notes – the aesthetic embodiment of post-war modernity, Polina Zhemchuzhina’s leading role in the Soviet cosmetics industry, the philosophy of scent – but the author does not quite manage to connect them into a single narrative.

Emily Couch is a Program Consultant for Eurasia at PEN America. Prior to this position, she worked as Program Assistant for Europe at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), where she worked on Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. She also previously worked at the Kennan Institute, where she regularly organized events featuring high-profile academics, practitioners, and political figures from the region, and frequently wrote blogs and reports on political developments in the region. She holds a double M.A. in Russian and Eastern European studies from University College London and the Higher School of Economics. She is a passionate advocate for fostering greater diversity and inclusion in the Eurasia field, and has spoken on and written about this topic for multiple conferences and platforms, including the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (ASEEES).

You can purchase the book here and in your favorite independent bookstore. If you are interested in reviewing one of the titles on our Books for Review list, please get in touch at PuncturedLines@gmail.com

Avdot’ia Panaeva’s Feminist Metafiction: An Excerpt from Margarita Vaysman’s Self-Conscious Realism

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

We’re proud to present an excerpt from Margarita Vaysman’s book-length study Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel. Published by Legenda, an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association (where it is available to order), this book focuses on the role of metafiction in the Russian novelistic tradition. The excerpt below is but a small taste of the depth and breadth of this project and highlights the work of one important practitioner of this technique, Avdot’ia Panaeva.

Avdot’ia Panaeva (1819-1893) was a successful novelist and short story writer, who made significant contributions to the development of ideas on education equality, marriage, women’s financial and property rights, and the problem of domestic violence. She was also a common-law wife of poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who was valorized in Soviet literary criticism and the popular canon. We are deeply grateful to Vaysman that, as a part of her research, she illuminates the process through which Panaeva’s legacy as a novelist and short story author has been excised from the canon of nineteenth-century Russian literature and begins the work of restoring it to its rightful place.   

  • Avdot’ia Panaeva

This edited excerpt is from Chapter Three, “A Woman’s Answer.”

Avdot’ia Panaeva’s literary fate—a successful and popular female writer demoted to the status of the “muse” of her more successful male partner—is hardly unique. It could even be considered perversely fortunate: many key female players of the mid-nineteenth-century Russian literary scene such as Evgeniia Tur, the Khvoschchinskaia sisters, or Maria Zhukova, are only now being re-introduced to Russian literary history and contemporary readers. However, Panaeva’s fall from literary grace also offers an insight into the history of the reception of Russian nineteenth-century metafiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The heightened self-reflexivity of her texts, notably Zhenskaia dolia [A Woman’s Lot], did not conform to the generally held perceptions of how a realist novel should function discursively and had therefore sped up her disappearance from the canon.

Zhenskaia dolia was written, much like Panaeva’s earlier prose pieces, to be published in Sovremennik [The Contemporary, a “thick” journal run by Nekrasov — PL] both as a gap-filler and a crowd-pleaser. Addressing the burning question of female emancipation, the novel would have already attracted the readers’ attention on account of its topic, but Panaeva’s style was a distinct advantage. Although ridiculed by contemporary critics as “heart-rending” [razdiratel’nyi], it was very popular with the readers. Most of Panaeva’s texts were favored enough to be re-issued as stand-alone editions soon after they appeared in Sovremennik in serialized form.

Vissarion Belinskii, Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Panaev, Avdot’ia Panaeva, a painting by Anatolii Lepilin, 1950

Avdot’ia Panaeva’s career at Sovremennik officially began in 1848 with the publication of a short story “Neostorozhnoe slovo” [Careless Word] already under her chosen pen name “N. Stanitskii.” Unofficially, she had been contributing to the journal ever since its new editorial team had taken over: the January 1847 volume featured a fashion column that Panaeva wrote together with her husband, Ivan Panaev. Mody [Fashions] remained a standing co-authored column in Sovremennik until 1857, except for the summer months when Panaev took sole responsibility for it while his wife was away in the country. As recent research shows, Panaeva also assisted the editors with the daily business of running the journal by reviewing and proofreading submitted manuscripts, as well as dealing with financial matters. From 1847 to 1864, Panaeva became an in-house writer and in practice an editorial assistant at Sovremennik. In the course of her career she published short stories, novellas and novels (two of which, Tri strany sveta [Three Countries of the World] (1848) and Mertvoe ozero [Dead Lake] (1851), were co-authored with Nekrasov), and a few anonymous literary reviews in Sovremennik.

Panaeva’s texts were first examined as facts of Russian literary history in the 1920s. In 1927-28, two of her most popular works, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (1889) and Semeistvo Tal’nikovykh [The Talnikov Family] (1848), were reissued by Academia, an early Soviet publishing house famous for its historical fiction series. Kornei Chukovskii, the literary critic and a popular children’s writer, produced a scholarly edition of Vospominaniia for Academia, and it was so popular with the readers that Academia re-issued it four times in the period 1927-33. Even though Chukovskii later claimed he had only spent an hour editing Panaeva’s manuscript, he must have undertaken a considerable amount of archival research to make these edits. Not only did he identify the real historical personalities behind the initials Panaeva used (made more confusing by the fact that she attached same initials to different people), he also verified and corrected her multiple chronological errors. Chukovskii first wrote a short essay accompanying the reissued text and then revised it into a larger piece on Panaeva’s relationship with Nekrasov for his book on the poet that came out the same year. In 1922, Chukovskii wrote an essay specifically on Panaeva as Nekrasov’s common-law wife, titled “Zhena poeta” [The Poet’s Wife], and published it as part of his series Nekrasovskaia biblioteka [Nekrasov’s library].

Panaeva’s Memoirs, 1972 edition

Chukovskii’s treatment of Panaeva is suggestive in many ways. Employing the early Soviet strategy of rehabilitating ideologically unsound texts by ascribing “progressive” tendencies to their authors, Chukovskii did an admirable job of whitewashing Panaeva’s questionable class credentials (coming from a family of successful actors, she was hardly a member of the proletariat). The critic praised “her democratic way of thinking” and argued that her texts, accessible even for the most unprepared reader, could function as an introduction to the mid-nineteenth-century Russian literary scene. Chukovskii’s article, despite its scholarly expertise and lively style, was a typical response to nineteenth-century women’s writing in early twentieth-century literary criticism: he saw Panaeva as a secondary historical and literary figure, only as interesting as the men she knew and too concerned with the trivialities of life to have produced anything of value. Even though Panaeva was a published and popular writer, according to the critic, Panaeva’s major claim to fame rested on her status as Nekrasov’s lover and muse: Chukovskii calls the poems Nekrasov had dedicated to Panaeva “the best monument to her life” and notes that “her place on the pages of Nekrasov’s works earns her the memory of posterity.” Finally, in the critic’s opinion, Panaeva was first a woman and only then—coincidentally—a writer: “Charming, universally admired, she was also a novelist, a writer!” Chukovskii suggested, erroneously, that Nekrasov did most of the writing of their co-authored texts and argued that Panaeva became an established writer almost by chance and would have preferred a more traditional womanly occupation.

Chukovskii’s patronizing assessment of Panaeva’s career had a great influence on how Soviet literary studies approached her work. From the 1920s onwards, scholars have mostly treated Panaeva as a writer whose main contribution to Russian literature consisted of providing invaluable information about her male contemporaries. Chukovskii’s dismissive attitude and his scathing remarks (he called Panaeva “simple-minded” [prostodushnaia] as well as “trivial and shallow” [obyvatel’ski-poverkhnostna], among other things) stuck, and the image of her primarily as a hostess of Sovremennik’s salon and Nekrasov’s “angry muse” rather than a novelist in her own right were perpetuated by generations of scholars.

Panaeva’s text serves as a third case study in my exploration of metafictional narrative strategies in a contained but representative sample of Russian novels of 1862-1863. Offering a reading of Zhenskaia dolia as feminist metafiction that aimed to “undermine established discourse within the novel’s narrative text” (in the words of the scholar Joan Douglas Peter),  I explore the similarities in the universal strategies of metanarrative that featured in the works of writers of varying ideological persuasion and literary skill. This chapter offers a brief discussion of Panaeva’s position in the Russian literary canon and some notes on the contemporary reception of her work in Russia and abroad. Following that, it reconstructs the historical and political context of the novel’s publication in 1862 and provides a close reading of Zhenskaia dolia as feminist metafiction with a narrative voice that transgresses the boundaries of gender.

Abstract:

Does metafiction—the literary technique that forces readers to acknowledge they are reading a work of fiction—have a hidden past? Margarita Vaysman’s insightful study establishes metafiction as an inherent part of the entire Russian novelistic tradition, not merely existing but thriving in the nineteenth century. Practiced by writers of often disparate ideological persuasions, metafiction was a creative answer to the period’s twin preoccupations with politics and aesthetics.

In Self-Conscious Realism, Vaysman examines metafiction’s complex correlation with Russian realism in three novels from across the ideological spectrum of the 1860s: What Is To Be Done? (1863) by the famous political radical Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Troubled Seas (1863) by the forgotten reactionary conservative Alexei Pisemskii, and Woman’s Lot (1862) by Avdot’ia  Panaeva, a female writer struggling for professional recognition. These case studies are richly contextualized by the writers’ diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as official legal and financial sources.

Please order the book from Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association.

NB: As most academic publications, this book is priced for university library purchases, but a much more accessibly priced paperback will be published in late 2022.

Margarita Vaysman is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) and Head of Department at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where she teaches Russian and comparative literature.  She is the author of Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel (2021) and co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Russian Realism: Society, Knowledge, Narrative (2020).  She specializes in Russian and Ukrainian literature, culture, and history of ideas, and is currently working on a cultural history of cross-dressing in Eastern Europe, exploring historical intersections between literature, culture, sexuality, fame, and fashion and their conflicted legacy in contemporary culture.

Translators Reflect Europe in Transition: an Excerpt and a Cast of Characters from Cathy McAteer’s monograph Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 3 Comments

We at Punctured Lines are delighted to bring to you an excerpt from Cathy McAteer’s monograph Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics (forthcoming from Routledge on January 4, 2021). As most academic publications, this book (available for pre-order here and here) is priced for university library purchases, but luckily for those of us without a university affiliation, this title will also be available as an Open Access publication. Please ask your libraries to order this title, and in the meantime, here’s a brief preview and a fascinating cast of characters whose work McAteer explores in her book.

Abstract: Launched in 1950, Penguin’s Russian Classics quickly progressed to include translations of many great works of Russian literature and the series came to be regarded by readers, both academic and general, as the de facto provider of classic Russian literature in English translation, the legacy of which reputation resonates right up to the present day. Through an analysis of the individuals involved, their agendas, and their socio-cultural context, this book, based on extensive original research, examines how Penguin’s decisions and practices when translating and publishing the series played a significant role in deciding how Russian literature would be produced and marketed in English translation. As such the book represents a major contribution to Translation Studies, to the study of Russian literature, to book history, and to the history of publishing.

The following extract has been selected from Chapter One: Creating Penguin’s Russian Classics, and is accompanied by abridged cameos of just some of the translators who feature in more detail during the course of the book.

[Excerpt begins]

[In 1946], British readers were still largely reliant on Constance Garnett’s renderings of the Russian literary canon. Hence while Rieu (Penguin Classics editor — PL) could easily make a case for re-translating the Russian classics, he did not have a wide choice of experienced Russian-English literary translators at his disposal. Since the era of vocational training in literary translation had not yet arrived, anyone with knowledge of translation theory would have been self-taught. Those commissioned by Rieu probably possessed intuitive translational talent and a feel for writing, or else aspired to develop both. Penguin’s early Russian classics translators might have acquired and used their language skills in different settings, both professional and personal, but without exception their backgrounds reflect the lived experience of a Europe in transition. Elisaveta Fen and David Magarshack immigrated to the United Kingdom from turbulent, post-revolutionary Russia; Rosemary Edmonds had worked as a senior wartime translator; Paul Foote studied Russian on the inter-service Joint Services School of Linguists (JSSL) course at Cambridge before working as an interpreter in Potsdam in 1946; and Richard Freeborn had worked in the Royal Air Force and post-war Potsdam, before finally moving to the British Embassy in Moscow. With background details such as these, it is not surprising that these individuals eventually found work which transposed their language skills to the field of translation in peace-time Britain. Where better to do this than Penguin Classics, the publisher of the moment?

Elisaveta Fen

Although Fen translated other Russian authors, Zoshchenko, Bondariev and Shvarts for other publishing houses, she translated only Chekhov’s plays for Penguin, adding four more plays (The Seagull, The Bear, The Proposal, A Jubilee) to a new 1954 edition, and a final edition in 1959. Correspondence reveals that Rieu declined Fen’s offer to translate Chekhov’s short stories for Penguin. Rieu informed her that ‘We are going slow on Russian works, apart from the 2 great works of Tolstoy and 4 of Dostoievsky’s’ (26 March 1957). Just six months later, however, Fen received confirmation of Penguin’s decision to commission a different Chekhov translator (Magarshack) instead:

I think it only fair to let you know now that we have just decided to place the work in the hands of another translator. I am afraid this news may be a disappointment to you, but you will remember that we and our advisors had something to say in criticism of the English style in which the samples were submitted. (Rieu, 1957)

Rosemary Edmonds

Rosemary Edmonds (1905-1998) worked as a translator to General de Gaulle at the Fighting France Headquarters in London, and on liberation in Paris. Having been funded by de Gaulle to study Russian at the Sorbonne after the war (Hahn, 2004), she was ‘recruited’ by Rieu (the details of their first meeting are not recorded) after submitting sample translations. She translated works by Tolstoi, starting with Anna Karenin (1954), the first re-translation in the UK since the Maudes’ version in the 1920s. Like Garnett before her, Edmonds embarked on a career in Russian literary translation without ever having been to Russia; in the same year that her translation of War and Peace was published, Edmonds informed Penguin (4 May 1957) that she had been invited to Russia for the first time.

Edmonds’s lack of direct experience of Russia might explain Rieu’s evaluation of her first typescript. In a letter to fellow editor A.S.B. Glover on the typescript of Anna Karenin, Rieu discussed the improvements she had made to the text at his suggestion (such as reading her ‘stuff aloud’ and consulting with native Russians). He remarks that, ‘I have examined the text carefully and found it good, though I do not think she is one of our A+ translators. I have also read the introduction which is, in my opinion, a bit feeble, but not altogether rotten’ (8 September 1952).

David Magarshack

David Magarshack

Whereas Edmonds exerted linguistic power over the Penguin editors, insisting that she knew best when it came to the text, there is no evidence to suggest that she ever called into question her terms and conditions. By contrast, Magarshack regularly challenged his editors Rieu and Glover over both payment and, to a lesser extent, textual matters. In Rieu’s introductory letter to Glover of 20 January 1949, he explains that Magarshack ‘lives by his translations’, adding, with a suggestion of caution, that he ‘has published translations from the Russian with other publishers and has several new ones in the hands of various firms (Faber’s, Lehman, etc [sic]). They deal generously with him’. We may presume from this that, in their initial meeting, Magarshack offered Rieu this information himself in a bid to increase his negotiating power, a position which is reiterated in Magarshack’s first letter to Glover. Dissatisfied that Glover appeared to be reneging on Rieu’s terms, Magarshack spelled out his views:

There is no question of approval at all. I am not an amateur, and my books have been published and are due to be published by well-known publishing houses […]. Mr Rieu was in complete agreement with me about this question of approval. (3 March 1949)

This cohort of fascinating characters had its day immediately after the war, but the next decades saw a shift to other, younger, differently trained translators such as Glenny whose Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov would change readers’ perceptions of what Russian literature meant. The second half of my book charts this change.

To keep on reading, please access the book through its publisher.

Dr. Cathy McAteer is Postdoctoral Fellow on the “Dark Side of Translation” project. She holds a PhD (2018) in Russian and Translation Studies from the University of Bristol, a Masters in Translation Studies (2011) and a first-class BA (Hons) in Russian (1996). Her main research interests lie in the field of classic Russian literature in English translation during the twentieth century, using archival material to shed new light on the people and processes behind historical commissions, specifically Penguin’s Russian Classics. Cathy taught Russian-English translation for the MA Translation Studies programme at the University of Bristol from 2013-2019. She has worked as a freelance commercial translator but has also translated the novella Timka’s Tale and a monograph on the Soviet sculptor David Yakerson. Cathy previously worked as an in-house translator in her role as Russia Coordinator at Nestle UK Ltd. Her academic monograph, Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics, is forthcoming from Routledge in 2021.

Note: “The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland and the USA” is an ERC-funded research project (Horizon 2020, Grant Agreement No.: 802437). To learn more, find it on twitter: @Rustransdark or use the project website: rustrans.exeter.ac.uk  

Readings on Blackness, Racism, and Russian and Eurasian Studies

~ hkohen ~ 1 Comment

This post reproduces and documents a Twitter thread that began on June 3, 2020, with articles by Aisha Powell, Sarah Valentine, B. Amarilis Lugo de Fabritz, and Jennifer Wilson. Various members of the Eurasian Studies community gradually added to the thread, creating an informal list of resources that, while useful, would also be ephemeral and difficult to find if left on social media. Here, in Punctured Lines’s more easily searchable archive, these resources are available for you to use and remix through a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This license applies only to the tweets by Hilah Kohen below and not to any of the content linked to them. You can use the license to create your own version of this resource list for a specific community or publication.

Both the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) have also published organized lists of texts, lectures, and podcasts relating to race and racism. While these databases intersect with the Twitter thread reproduced here, they focus on offering additional materials that are relevant to scholars and teachers of Eurasian languages and cultures.

To keep things maximally readable, we chose to preserve Twitter’s format for some posts and to transpose others to a text-based layout. We welcome all feedback and links to additional resources. To access the thread below directly on Twitter, click here.

Especially for fellow Eurasianists just starting out, tho, this is work to read as we wade into the bs going forward. Not comprehensive– just what comes to mind re: student experiences, teaching, and what our field does on a systemic level. Less material here on research. /2

“Black Bread: A look inside the world of black Slavic studies scholars” by @AishaPowell_ for @trumplandiamag /3

“Russian Studies’ Alt-Right Problem” by Sarah Valentine for the Chronicle (paywalled but important– if anyone has a non-paywalled link or is willing to share access, please say so) /4

“Race, Diversity, and Our Students in Russia” by @boricuaslavist for @NYUJordanCenter /5

.@JenLouiseWilson‘s 2014-2015 series “Teaching Race in Russia” plus “Is Slavic ready for Minorities?” for @NYUJordanCenter (more links below) /6

“Teaching Race in Russia: Dispatches from ‘The Harlem Renaissance: From New York to Tashkent'” by @JenLouiseWilson /7

“Teaching Race in Russia Part II: From Harlem to the ‘Soviet South'” by Jennifer Wilson /8

“Teaching Race in Russia Part III: Sartre, Jazz, and the Cossack Dance” by Jennifer Wilson /9

“Teaching Race in Russia: Some Conclusions” by Jennifer Wilson /10

Material for listening & then further research: “The Global Alt-Right: Race and U.S.-Russia Relations” @NYUJordanCenter: http://youtube.com/watch?v=4DeKIKG-HX0… /11

Loads of posts and articles on @raceineurasia /12

Please add more if you have time/energy somehow (I’ve only read narrowly & also haven’t included any books here) and add your essential readings related to research on race in Eurasian and Russian studies /13

One last “goes without saying” is that this thread is an addendum to concrete monetary/physical/logistical action right now and in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading /15

Adding “#BlackOctober Reading List: The Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora” by @JenLouiseWilson and @mightykale. Super thorough starting point for reading on the Black diaspora and the USSR plus some temporally broader pieces

Am learning that I don’t know how to keep up with Twitter replies very well, so I’m sorry if I miss something! I really appreciate the words of thanks, but they should be directed elsewhere. I respect all of you beyond words, but there’s a misunderstanding of scale here.

For white scholars who want the field to change, these conversations about race in the field have so far meant working on ourselves, supporting students, and responding to individual incidents. Necessary steps. This category of responses to the thread is passing by another:

Black scholars and scholars of color have worked constantly for years against the racism of a thousands-strong field and gotten crap in return. Our field’s record is one of forcing all Black scholars out. That there are still meaningful experiences to be had doesn’t change this.

That’s the scale we’ve got to be on. I don’t know how to frame this rhetorically– I fit into the first tweet above, not the second. This is just a total split in the responses to this thread, and it’s also (quite sickeningly) evident in the thread itself.

Our colleagues have pushed the field’s leadership & their mentors out of personal necessity and at daily personal cost; built successful, growing programs at their institutions from precarious positions; written numerous papers about the concept of them having room in the field.

Sometimes, we don’t know we even can do things on that scale because we don’t have to be on that scale to stay in the field, plus the field doesn’t ask it of us. Meanwhile, there’s prolific work being done under extreme pressure. We have to be on that scale.

I feel ill writing these things in this bizarre tone and as if from outside. Obviously, nobody has denied all this; you know this; everybody here is being so supportive. The question is what’s next & can it possibly be enough.

I should add– useful assuming a considerate and broadly informed approach.

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Book Love: Julia Voznesenskaya’s The Women’s Decameron

~ Yelena Furman ~ 20 Comments

(This blog post had to happen sometime.)

Sure, we’ve all fallen in love with people, but some of us have also fallen in love with books. I was in my early twenties, living in a newly post-Soviet Moscow, where I’d gone to work after college. Censorship had collapsed along with the Soviet Union, and many types of previously banned literature were flooding the Russian market. Tables with piles of books for sale were regular features outside many of the city’s metro stations. They were an incongruous mix of serious fiction by the likes of Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, self-help manuals, erotica of dubious provenance, and Russian translations of detective novels by James Hadley Chase. I don’t have an exact memory, but given that a good number of my books from that period were purchased off such tables, it is highly likely that this is where I found a novel titled Zhenskii Dekameron — The Women’s Decameron (transl. W.B. Linton, publ. Atlantic Monthly Press; other editions in Russian and English exist). Without a doubt, the fact that the word zhenskii was in the title was a major selling point. It was by a writer named Julia Voznesenskaya (here and elsewhere, I am using the spelling of authors’ names as they appear on their English translations, but given my willingness to die on the hill of Library of Congress transliteration, I am absolutely cringing inside). I’d never heard of her. She changed my life.

Voznesenskaya wrote The Women’s Decameron in 1985 while in exile in what was then West Germany. Many writers were expelled from the Soviet Union, but what makes her case highly unusual was that it was due to feminist activity. She came to feminism via her involvement in the dissident movement in the 1970s, for which she was arrested and imprisoned. Although she wasn’t initially interested in women’s issues, time in all-women’s camps and prisons changed her mind. She and three other women founded the Soviet feminist movement (it was tiny, but still a thing); they formed a women’s club and put out journals of women’s writing, for which they were hounded by the KGB and made to leave. Three of the four founders, including Voznesenskaya, were religious, and their views resembled Russian Orthodox teachings more than feminist theory, but The Women’s Decameron bears little trace of this. In the West, they broke up over their religious-secular divide, but not before being interviewed by Ms. Magazine. In the process of editing this post, Olga found a Calvert Journal article about the exhibition Leningrad Feminism 1979, devoted to this Soviet feminist collective; it was shown in St. Petersburg earlier this year, and once COVID-19 conditions allow, will move to Moscow and then to locations in Western Europe. Thank you so much, Olga, for this amazing, and unexpected find — hopefully, this exhibition is a start to making these Soviet feminists better known in both Russia and the West. Voznesenskaya herself won’t know about it: she died in Berlin in 2015. There’s a good chance, though, that she wouldn’t want anything to do with it. After emigration, she wrote detective novels, but then spent some time in a French monastery, whereby she renounced her previous works and turned to writing Russian Orthodox fantasy (don’t ask; I don’t know).

The Women’s Decameron is Voznesenskaya’s first, and best-known work, although in this case, “best-known” is a relative term (I was surprised and overjoyed when several people on Twitter responded to my, um, numerous posts saying they’d read it, although given all the brilliant Russian literature people on Twitter, I shouldn’t have been surprised). Because Voznesenskaya was exiled, The Women’s Decameron was not published in the Soviet Union; when it became available in post-Soviet Russia, it went seemingly unnoticed. She may be most familiar in Slavic academia in the West, and even then, not so much.

My poor love deserves better. A reworking of Boccaccio’s Decameron from a female point of view, the novel features ten women of different backgrounds and life experiences quarantined together after giving birth in a late Soviet-era maternity ward because of a spreading infection (if nothing else, read it for the unintentional parallel with our current situation, although I promise you, there’s much more to it than that). They pass the time telling stories about their lives and those of their friends and families in ten chapters containing each of their ten stories, with an author-narrator who opens and closes the pieces. Each chapter is devoted to a different theme; when I teach this novel in my course Writing the Body in Contemporary Russian Women’s Fiction, we read “First Love,” “Sex in Farcical Situations,” “Rapists and their Victims,” and “Happiness.” Love and happiness (or, rather, a distinct lack thereof) are common themes in Russian literature; but the two other titles, and the all-female space of this novel, signal that The Women’s Decameron is a different type of book.

Russian literature has no shortage of women writers and female protagonists. But as Barbara Heldt notes in Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature, which I could cite directly if it weren’t for the pandemic-induced closure of our university library, what is considered the Russian canon is overwhelmingly made up of male writers and male protagonists. Female protagonists, while crucial to the plot, are usually complements to their male counterparts, and their own development is rarely shown. Other scholars have pointed out Russian literature’s puritanical approach to the body and sexuality, which were not considered appropriate subjects for “high” literature. Once in a while, male characters got to be physical, but women rarely did, and one was thrown under a train for trying.

This changed in the liberalized atmosphere of glasnost’ and the early post-Soviet period, which witnessed an explosion of women’s voices. In defiance of Russian and Soviet patriarchy and puritanism, writers such as Svetlana Vasilenko, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Valeria Narbikova, and Marina Palei, among many others, created a female-centered space in Russian literature, with women protagonists who were both intellectual and physical beings. Their works, often explicitly concerned with the act of writing, were characterized by a palpable presence of female bodies in various manifestations: sex, violence, pregnancy, abortion, disease, etc. While none of them had read French feminist theory, and several openly eschewed any association with feminism, they were, in Hélène Cixous’s formulation, writing the body. In Slavic Studies in the West, these writers, who do not form a coherent whole but have enough in common to be talked about together, became known as New Women’s Prose, first and foremost due to the pioneering efforts of Helena Goscilo, in such publications as Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost (having relied on it extensively in my dissertation, this one I have on my shelves).

The few scholars who have written on Voznesenskaya place her in the general category of Soviet women’s literature, while those who write on New Women’s Prose don’t include her. This is understandable, since living in West Germany, she had no connections with the other Russian women writers. But the striking similarity is that Voznesenskaya also writes the body: The Women’s Decameron centers women’s narratives of sexuality, violation, etc. It’s a pretty convincing argument, if I do say so myself (I did say so myself, in my dissertation and in the article I wrote about The Women’s Decameron).

An account of sex on the roof due to a lack of privacy in an acute Soviet housing shortage – that’s in there. The story about appearing in front of a theater audience in bed with your lover due to the mechanism of an inopportunely revolving stage — that’s in there too, as is a romp with an American “spy” on top of the heads of three KGB agents hiding under the bed during a room search gone awry. Also in there are the more somber stories of child sexual abuse and the many instances of rape, some of which the women verbalize for the first time to each other. Powerless to stop being raped in life, they support each other and try to heal themselves through telling their stories. And in one instance, they, and we, are overcome by unadulterated hilarity and gratitude because a character was able to get highly painful revenge on her would-be attacker with a pair of imported mittens. Female bodies, both their pleasures and pains, are very much written here.

Admittedly, in a novel that consciously tries to represent a spectrum of women’s experiences, making them all mothers is a regressive move. That said, Voznesenskaya goes against convention in allowing motherhood to coexist with sexuality (take that, Tolstoy), and notably, the characters bond over a range of topics, not motherhood itself. Indeed, she espouses several ideas that make her ahead of her time. She openly terms one protagonist a feminist, which, let’s just say isn’t something one expects from late Soviet-era works (or, really, many other eras). There is also a recognition that other types of oppression intersect with gender: several protagonists’ lives are shaped by their economic standing, whereas another’s is by being Jewish, the latter also indicative of Voznesenskaya’s rejection of Soviet anti-Semitism. A storyline about one of the protagonists’ love interests mentions racism toward those from the Caucasus. There’s more to say about what else The Women’s Decameron does, including revealing aspects of Soviet life that the regime tried to silence, but that would require another post.

When I say Voznesenskaya changed my life, partially I mean that she largely determined my academic path, handing me my dissertation topic and leading me to discover the other contemporary women writers, whom I teach and have written on. More fundamentally, I mean that The Women’s Decameron was my first time reading a Russian work that gave voice to viscerally honest, specifically female experiences. Over the years, I’d had lots of amazing conversations with Russian books, but this was the first one that spoke back in a shared language. In the women writers course, my students really respond to this novel. Some of them say about all the writers that they didn’t know there was Russian literature like this. I didn’t either, until Voznesenskaya, and through her several others, showed me that there could be.

Below is the opening of The Women’s Decameron. The right-hand image underneath that shows the never-to-be-detached Post-it notes from graduate school. Although this novel is, sadly, out of print, the English translation is still available here and, as much as I don’t want to recommend a particular mail-order giant, here. In Russian, it seems to be available here and online here (although I have no personal knowledge of either of those sites). Try it. Who knows; you might fall in love, too.

The Women’s Decameron by Julia Voznesenskaya

“How is it possible to read in this bedlam!” thought Emma. She turned over on to her stomach, propped the Decameron between her elbows, pulled the pillow over her ears and tried to concentrate.

She could already visualize how the play would begin. As they entered the auditorium and spectators would not be met by the usual theatre attendants, but by monks with their cowls drawn down over their eyes; they would check the tickets and show the spectators to their seats in the dark auditorium, lighting the way and pointing out the seat numbers, with old-fashioned lanterns. She would have to call in at the Hermitage, look out a suitable lantern, and draw a sketch of it … The stage would be open from the very beginning, but lit only by a bluish moon. It would depict a square in Florence with the dark outlines of a fountain and a church door, over which would be the inscription “Memento Mori” – remember you must die. Every now and then some monks would cross the stage with a cart – the corpse collectors. And a bell, there must definitely be a bell ringing the whole time – “For whom the bell tolls.” It was essential that from the very beginning, even before the play started, there should be a feeling of death in the theatre. Against this background ten merry mortals would tell their stories.

Yet it was difficult to believe that it happened like that: plague, death and misery were all around and in the midst of this a company of cavaliers and ladies were amusing each other with romantic and bawdy stories. These women; on the other hand, did not have the plague but a simple skin infection such as frequently occurs in maternity hospitals, and yet look at all the tears and hysterics! Perhaps people were much shallower nowadays. Stupid women, why were they so impatient? Were they in such a hurry to

start the nappy-changing routine? God, the very thought was enough to make you want to give up: thirty liners, thirty nappies and as many swaddling sheets, rain or shine. And each one had to be washed, boiled and ironed on both sides. It could drive you crazy. In the West they had invented disposable nappies and plastic pants long ago. Our people were supposed to be involved in industrial espionage, so why couldn’t they steal some useful secret instead of always going for electronics?

“Hey, girls! You could at least take it in turns to whine! The noise is really bugging me. If my milk goes off I’ll really freak out!” This outburst came from Zina, a “woman of no fixed abode” as the doctors described her on their rounds; in other words, a tramp. Nobody came to visit her, and she was in no hurry to leave the hospital.

“If only we had something nice to think about!” sighed Irina, or Irishka as everyone called her, a plump girl who was popular in the ward because of her kind, homely disposition.

And then it suddenly dawned on Emma. She lifted the Decameron high above her head so that everyone could see the fat book in its colourful cover. “Dear mothers! How many of you have read this book? “Naturally about half of them had. “Well,” continued Emma, “for those who haven’t I’ll explain it simply. During a plague ten young men and women leave the city and place themselves in quarantine for ten days, just as they’ve done to us here. Each day they take it in turns to tell each other different stories about life and love, the tricks that clever lovers play and the tragedies that come from love. How about all of us doing the same?”

That was all they needed. They immediately decided that this was much more interesting than telling endless stories about family problems.

Mary Poppins in Russia: an excerpt from Elena Goodwin’s book Translating England into Russian, available from Bloomsbury

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

As a part of our investment into cultural, linguistic, and geographical hybridity of stories told about the Soviet Union, we at Punctured Lines are delighted to present an excerpt from a recent book by Elena Goodwin, Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children’s Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia, published by Bloomsbury.

In eight chapters covering both the Soviet period and post-Soviet Russia, Elena Goodwin explores translations of English children’s literature. She looks closely at the work of leading translators working from English to Russian, including Samuil Marshak, Korney Chukovsky, Boris Zakhoder, Irina Tokmakova, and Nina Demurova, among others, and considers how representations of Englishness depended on USSR’s ideology and reflected the shifts in post-Soviet Russia’s political and cultural climate.

Though this book is aimed primarily at academic historians and translation scholars, we believe it has much to offer to translators, bilingual readers, creative writers, and all others interested in the way one culture might be translated–or not–into another. Its focus on popular children’s and young adult literature makes the reading particularly enjoyable because so many of us are familiar with at least one version of the primary texts.

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 7: Framing P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins in Ideological and Cultural Contexts: Translating Features of English National Character. This is only a brief section of what is a fascinating story about how Mary Poppins became Russified, and how the portrait of England itself has been transformed in translation.

Our deep gratitude to the author, Elena Goodwin, and to Bloomsbury for giving us their permission and assistance with publishing this excerpt. Please enjoy–and buy the book, and ask your library to purchase it.

[Excerpt begins]

Soviet readers were first introduced to the Mary Poppins books in 1968. The Soviet version was called Meri Poppins [Mary Poppins] and consisted of two parts (House № 17 and Mary Poppins Comes Back) with a mention on the title page that the translation was abridged. Boris Zakhoder, the first translator of the Mary Poppins books, did not have the originals and had to borrow them from the library. He mentioned in his letter to Pamela Travers in 1969 that, strange as it may seem, he did not own any of her books and that he had used library copies in order to produce his translation. P. L. Travers sent all her Mary Poppins books to Boris Zakhoder by the end of 1969 (the first four books of the series), as he mentioned in his reply to her. This correspondence points to my supposition that the original books were not freely accessible to the general public and might have been on a censor’s list as titles not allowed for circulation.

The reason why Mary Poppins was not translated into Russian for so long was perhaps revealed by Travers herself when she suggested in an interview given to The New Yorker in 1962 that the Soviet authorities might consider Mary Poppins ‘a bourgeois institution’:

My great hope is to have her translated into Russian …. I know we don’t have any copyright agreement with Russia, but I say to my agent, ‘Never mind. Leave her around where the Russians can steal her.’ We haven’t left her around enough yet. I suppose the authorities would take her au pied de la lettre – they’d say a nursemaid was a bourgeois institution – but the children would understand her.

A narrow circle of people might have known about the existence of Mary Poppins as a literary character after the Disney film Mary Poppins was shown at the Fourth Moscow International Film Festival in July 1965. The title of the book and the name of the author appeared in the opening credits and an attentive viewer could have spotted that the movie was based on the books about Mary Poppins. Although the Disney film was screened as an out-of-competition film, it was a hit with the festival audience. However, it was not shown in Soviet cinemas afterwards. In the 1980s people could find it only on pirated videotapes and only after the demise of the Soviet Union did the Disney Mary Poppins become available to the general public.

Another reason for failing to introduce books about Mary Poppins to Soviet readers might be explained by Travers’s negative views about the Soviet Union. In 1932 Travers went to the Soviet Union to see Leningrad and Moscow and published a book about her journey in 1934 (before she wrote Mary Poppins), which was called Moscow Excursion. This book was immediately reviewed in the New York Times and called ‘impertinent and gay’; it was mentioned that Travers found the way the Soviet Union presented itself appalling and that the Soviets would probably denounce her as a ‘class enemy’. Travers depicted the Soviet Union as a depressing society and noted ‘the drabness, the universal grey, the complete sameness of the people’. According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, Travers toured the Soviet Union to understand its politics but had little sympathy beforehand or on her return to England. Travers’s lack of sympathy towards Soviet society is explicitly demonstrated in the book’s introduction: ‘In a world rocking madly between Fascism and Communism the writer prefers the latter form of tyranny if the choice must be made.’ As discussed in Chapter 3 of this book, the 1930s saw severe restrictions on the circulation of foreign literature in the Soviet Union. Censorship control was strengthened amid fears of intervention by international capitalism in the USSR; and foreign mass media, as well as literature were considered a great force for the promotion of ill feeling towards the Soviet Union. This is the most logical explanation why the foreign publication of Travers’s Moscow Excursion might have affected the possibility of her Mary Poppins books being translated in the Soviet Union.

According to the correspondence between Travers and Zakhoder, it was the famous Soviet children’s poet Sergey Mikhalkov who met Travers in Switzerland at the end of the 1960s and told her that her books had been translated into Russian. The Soviet Mary Poppins immediately became very popular among Soviet adult and child readers, as Zakhoder’s letters to Travers show. Zakhoder wrote in his letter to Travers in 1969 that the print-run of ten thousand copies was instantly sold out in Moscow and that there were favourable reviews, including one in the literary journal Novyi mir. In the 1970s the translation was adapted for a radio show and for the stage, the script of which was also written by Zakhoder. Moreover, updated versions of the play have been performed in theatres around the country since 1991. In 1983 Mary Poppins appeared on Soviet TV screens in the film Meri Poppins, do svidania. It immediately became a hit and has been very popular since its first broadcast. At the same time, Mary Poppins was turned into a household name in modern Russia – babysitter agencies, cafés, family fun centres and even a fashion label are all called after the famous nanny.

Zakhoder regretted in his letter to Travers that his translation was abridged – fifteen chapters only from the first, the second and the third books – and mentioned that he was not able to obtain the fourth book. In the preface to the first edition Zakhoder promised Soviet children that they would meet with Mary Poppins again and that the story would be continued. Unfortunately, he did not keep his promise and the omitted chapters have never been recovered in the subsequent reprints of Zakhoder’s translation. Although two retranslations appeared in the 1990s (by Marina Litvinova and Igor Rodin), Zakhoder’s translation is considered a canonical text in Russian culture and is well positioned in the Russian children’s literature market.

In a letter to Travers in July 1969 the director of the Detskaia Literatura publishing house K. Piskunov explained why the Russian translation was abridged (quoted from the Russian original and its English translation, which was enclosed with the official letter sent to P. L. Travers):

Сокращение отдельных глав было обусловлено не только трудностями их перевода, но и большим желанием издать одновременно обе части, а детям младшего возраста, на кого рассчитана эта книга, мы избегаем давать книги большого объема.
[Abridgement of separate chapters was necessary partly owing to difficulties of translating and the desire to publish both parts at the same time and because for the younger children for whom this book is intended we do not like and avoid giving bulky books.]

He also said that it was uncertain whether B. Zakhoder would continue the translation of the next books about Mary Poppins and whether Detskaia Literatura would be able to revise the current translation. This letter points to the prevailing ideological conventions in Soviet literature written for children. At the same time, it signals the presence of censorship, although this matter is not clearly expressed in the correspondence. It is possible that self-censorship and editorial decisions could have somehow influenced Zakhoder’s opinion, to a certain extent, on how to construct the image of the English nanny in a way that Soviet child and adult readers of the late 1960s would accept, understand and like; and why certain chapters should not be included into his version, thus modifying the original structure of Travers’s books and the hidden message contained in them.

The first three books, Mary Poppins (1934), Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935) and Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), have elements of myth and are structured as myth – the interconnected chapters are repeated and everything returns, but in a modified manner. In Zakhoder’s translation the books’ original structure is modified, thereby distorting Travers’s intention to create the books in the form of myth. Travers was not happy about the new structure of the stories in Zakhoder’s translation and pointed out in a letter to Zakhoder that ‘the books are written in a definite rhythm and the stories should be read in their proper sequence’. She also added that she had ‘always thought that Russian readers would like it as they have a great sense of humour and poetry’, as she discovered when she went to Russia in the 1930s. Unfortunately, the Soviet readers who could not obtain the original texts (as well as the Russian readers nowadays who prefer Zakhoder’s translation) were not aware of the original narrative and Travers’s intention to create the original in the mythic form.

Zakhoder omitted one of every pair of repetitive chapters. It is difficult to know whether there was too much of the untranslatable in these chapters from the point of view of Zakhoder and the editor of Detskaia literatura publishing house, or whether there were ideological reasons for the omissions. In the first book, Mary Poppins, Zakhoder excluded the chapters ‘The Day Out’, ‘Bad Tuesday’, ‘The Bird Woman’ and ‘Christmas Shopping’. It is possible that the chapters ‘The Day Out’ and ‘Christmas Shopping’ were omitted because they contain lengthy descriptions of Mary Poppins’s clothes and of what the characters bought as their Christmas presents in, as Travers says, ‘the Largest Shop in the World’. Also the chapter ‘Christmas Shopping’ refers to Christmas as a religious celebration. From the point of view of Soviet ideology, both chapters might have looked like propaganda for religion and consumerism in the West, which might have been thought unsuitable for Soviet children.

The chapter ‘Day Out’ might have been left out because it echoed the chapter ‘Bad Wednesday’ from the second book that was translated. Both chapters show a slipping from reality into an imaginary world through a portal to the unreal: in the first book Mary Poppins goes into the coloured-chalk picture drawn on the pavement by her friend Bert the Match-man and goes on an outing with him; in the second book Jane finds herself in the past inside the antique Royal Doulton bowl after she accidentally cracks it. It is difficult to guess why the chapter ‘The Bird Woman’ was excluded because it does not contain any lexical difficulties for translation, nor does it have any ideologically sensitive allusions to religion, mysticism or the bourgeois style of life. The chapter ‘Bad Tuesday’ corresponds to the chapter ‘Bad Wednesday’ from the second book. Also the chapter ‘Bad Tuesday’ contained stereotyped representations of Africans, Chinese, Eskimos and American Indians, which was considered inoffensive when the book was first published (but accusations of racism appeared later, in the 1970s, and Travers was forced to replace the stereotyped ethnic characters, which caused offence in the United States, with exotic animals in the revised 1981 edition). It is highly likely that the Soviet censor would never allow a book with racial content for publication. Most probably these were the reasons for omitting the chapter ‘Bad Tuesday’.

In the second book, Mary Poppins Comes Back, Zakhoder left out the chapters ‘Topsy- Turvy’, ‘The New One’, ‘Robertson Ay’s Story’, ‘The Evening Out’ and ‘Nellie-Rubina’. The chapters ‘Topsy-Turvy’ and ‘Laughing Gas’ (included in the first book) have the same pattern – the children and Mary Poppins go to see her relatives; therefore, the appearance of another surreal adventure might have been the reason for omitting the chapter ‘Topsy-Turvy’ from the translation. However, by neglecting this chapter the translator denied his readers the opportunity to find out that the Royal Doulton bowl (which got broken in the translated chapter ‘Bad Wednesday’) was mended by Mary Poppins’s cousin Mr Turvy. The other chapters from the second book not included in Zakhoder’s translation might not have been thought suitable for Soviet children because of their allusions to religion, existential and spiritual ideas widely incorporated by Travers throughout the whole series of books. (Travers was interested in fairy tales, mythological literature, mysticism and spiritualism.) The chapter ‘Nellie-Rubina’ might have been left out because it alludes to Noah’s Ark as a Biblical topos or because it echoes the chapter ‘Mrs Cory’ included in the translation. The chapter ‘The New One’ repeats the translated chapter ‘The Twins’ from the first book, but it also has the newborn Annabel saying that she came from ‘the Dark where all things have their beginning’: ‘I am earth and air and fire and water … I come from the sea and its tides … It was a long journey’. The chapter ‘The Evening Out’ has a similar pattern to the translated chapter ‘Full Moon’ from the first book but at the same time it questions the nature of existence and contemplates the universe in a spiritual way. Finally, in the chapter ‘Robertson Ay’s Story’ the silly king is mocked by all his subjects but his jester, the Dirty Rascal, teaches him to be true to himself and do what he wants. This chapter might have been deemed unsuitable because of its individualistic approach to life but it is also safe to say that Zakhoder might have decided to substitute this chapter with the translated chapter ‘The Cat That Looked at the King’ from the third book Mary Poppins Opens the Door.

It appears that ideological norms (in the form of self-censorship) played a partial role in the process of choosing which chapters to translate. At the same time, it is important to take into account the counterargument of Alexandra Borisenko, who proposes that in order to avoid repetitions and to make the Russian translation a more interesting read, Zakhoder chose his favourite chapter from two repetitive ones. A similar opinion is expressed by Galina Zakhoder (Zakhoder’s widow):

Pamela Travers often exploits the same [literary] devices. In one chapter [characters] are flying under the ceiling, in another chapter – they are flying in some other way. And the narration in these parts loses its pace. Boris omitted passages of such a kind. I think Travers got angry when she found out the truth. It appeared to me that she felt that Zakhoder was right, that is why she was angry.

This view is feasible and can be explained by Zakhoder’s possible misunderstanding of the peculiarities of the narrative structure of the Mary Poppins books. It also points to the presence of the translator’s co-authorial voice based on his own literary preferences.

[End of excerpt]

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Rus­sophone Science Fic­tion and Uto­pias in the Mar­gins, an essay by Sanna Tuorma in Aleksanteri Insight

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 4 Comments

This article published in December just before the holidays, seems worth highlighting. The topic is dear to me: I’ve been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy literature, and I am particularly fond of contemporary feminist science fiction. But first, I want to highlight the books that Tuorma mentions in her essay.

Tuorma begins with a review of a scholarly volume, The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia (I.B. Tauris, Sept. 19, 2019), edited by Mikhail Suslov and Per-Arne Bodin. As always with scholarly publications, this book is insanely expensive. Amazon, however, does have a decent preview of it that includes the introduction and gives us a good sense of the various threads of inquiry in this book.

Summarizing the volume’s findings, Tuorma writes, “Current Russian scientific and fantasy literature, both utopian and dystopic, seems to lack the radical and transformative power seminal to science fiction.” She suggests, following the advice of a Finnish-language publication Voima “to abandon dystopias, the predominant mode of global cultural production, and to envision ecological and economic utopias instead.”

She offers one recent anthology of Russian-language feminist and LGBT science fiction that comes from outside of the imperial center. This book, Совсем другие, is available in full from Academia.edu–in the Russian language. An English translation of its opening story, “Element 174,” penned by Kyrgyz activist and academic Syinat Sultanalieva, recently appeared in The Calvert Journal, translated by Lesya Myata and Samuel Goff.

I was born this way: a shameless lesbian. Ever since it became clear that I would have to be physically present on the planet of Omay, it had been my personal goal to sleep with as many of their famously gorgeous women as possible. There were rumours that they were all lesbians. I think my brothers would have understood, had they known about my plans — after all, it wasn’t exactly easy to get hold of women on Earth. There weren’t many left, and those that remained had mostly already been distributed amongst the domains. Those who grew up in ours were either too young or already related to me. I might be a lesbian, but I’m not so craven as to seduce them. I had to get by as best I could, making rare visits to the worse-for-wear residents of the Wild Zone or engaging in self-care. Luckily my father had some antique pictures and videos of sordid delights from before the Exodus, so I could indulge my fantasies at will.

https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/9831/being-lgbtq-element-174-syinat-sultanalieva-shtab

I’m incredibly grateful to Tuorma for pointing out what looks to be a very exciting read.

Looking over the articles that comprise the scholarly volume, I do find it unfortunate that the names of whom I think first in the list of post-Soviet science fiction and fantasy authors had not been taken up for consideration. My personal anthology of writers in this genre begins with the names of Max Frei, Lena Eltang, Linor Goralik, Elena Pervushina–that’s off the top of my head…

Central Asian feminists are carving out their space in gender studies, by Aizada Arystanbek

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Part of Open Democracy’s “new series on activism, academia and equality in Central Asia,” this piece is by Aizada Arystanbek, “a Central Asian graduate student of gender studies in Europe” (links to the other pieces in the series are included). As she writes, “along with the thrill of being able to study what I am passionate about comes a certain violence of erasure, as I am left constantly searching for my identity in feminist academia.

As I think about Russia’s colonisation of Central Asia and the process of Russification my mother had to undergo in her school in Tselinograd (the former name of the current capital of Kazakhstan), I feel deeply for Latina, black and indigenous women who write about their ancestors being colonised, their land being stolen, and them being perceived as backward simply because they lacked culture in the western conception of the word.

But I am always caught in between these various identities and almost never am I seen for my own very distinguishable one, a Central Asian woman. I have to stitch together my identity in academia by myself, learning little-by-little from other feminist scholars of colour, hoping that I understand their experiences correctly and that their words will represent my struggle accurately when I use them in my essays.”

Central Asia, once part of the Soviet Union and now comprising independent nations, is not particularly well known in the West. In the U.S., academic study of the region has traditionally come out of Slavic departments, where it has only recently begun to garner more attention, although not necessarily about issues of gender and feminism. This series looks to be an important and much-needed step in this direction.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/central-asian-feminists-are-carving-out-their-space-gender-studies/