In 1932, acclaimed Soviet documentarian and pioneer of the found footage compilation film, Esfir Shub, announced her intention to make a film about women. Described by her as "a cinematic document about Soviet women," the project aimed to combine an observational approach with an intense dramatic structure. By the end of 1933, Shub and her co-author, Soviet writer Boris Lapin, had completed a seven-chapter script titled Women, which focused on four individual heroines. Alas, Shub's cinematic document about women never came to fruition and survives only as a collection of documents-including the script, some notes, and a handful of photographs selected by the director for the film. This article reclaims the story of Shub's unreal ized feminist manifesto, Women. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, it reconstructs a continuous history of the project and uses this historical context to analyze the script, shedding light on what is arguably the most obscure-and most important-period of Shub's filmmaking career. The article demonstrates how Shub's inventive documentary vision came into conflict with the ideological constraints of the state. Finally, it argues that while Shub's innovations never reached the screen, they remain significant for offering an alternative developmental path for documentary film and for reshaping our understanding of feminist film history.
This paper aims to examine and discuss the meaning and the profound relationship established between body and power in the short story "Devushka Roza" ("Young Rosa," 1944) by Andrei Platonov, situating it within the context of the writer's later works while also considering his previous novels and short stories. In "Young Rosa," the representation of the body serves as a priem, a literary device Platonov employs to move beyond of dichotomy "individual" and "collective," toward a broader understanding of the interplay between the "individual" and "power." A close reading of story and an analysis of its different editions will demonstrate how Platonov was developing a reflection on totalitarian systems and, more specifically, on the role violence as one of the principal tools through which regimes-in this case the Soviet regime-seek to exercise power over individuals. Rosa's body is not only subjected to torture, but also becomes the symbol of an absolute loss of self, a nullification the human being, which annihilates her to the point of complete dissolution of own identity.
The question seems simple: what specific types of labor allow a director, screenwriter, cinematographer, costume designer, or makeup artist to call themselves by one job title and not another?1 To us, the answer might seem obvious, even self-evident. But in the late 1950s, this is a question that Nina Agadzhanova, a screenwriting professor at VGIK (Vsesoiuznyi gosudarst-vennyi institut kinematografii), took seriously enough to work through in her unfinished article, "Who Can be the Author of a Screenplay?" As Agadzhanova's title tells us, she was curious about the conditions that bestowed the uncommon title of "author" upon one person whose work helped bring a film project to fruition. The essay opens optimistically, stating that "anyone who can write, create, and imagine can become an author," but without warning, Agadzhanova indicts the "criminal" greed of many film directors. According to her, directors often assert in post-production that they, too, are worthy of co-authorship credit shared with a screenwriter: Sometimes you must deal with the dishonesty of a director who appropriates the creative work of a screenwriter, or who extorts co-authorship from them, or who distorts the author's plot in the name of copyright. This is a judicial, legal, and moral issue [...] But if the director newly creates, changes, or adds to the completed script during filming, then the script becomes a pseudo-artistic work, or raw material; or, the director himself is just ignorant (which is no less common than a bad film scriptwriter); or, we are dealing with a criminal matter [delo s kriminalom] (i.e. the desire to be a co-author).
This cluster seeks to highlight the contributions of women filmmakers and feminist film scholars to the cinemas of the late Russian Empire and the early USSR. The introduction provides an overview of the history of women's participation in these cinema industries, an overview of Anglophone film scholarship on Russian Imperial and Soviet women's cinema, and brief summaries of the articles included in the cluster.
This article discusses the 1929 film The Last Attraction (Poslednii attraktsion), directed by Ol'ga Preobrazhenskaia and Ivan Pravov. Ol'ga Preobrazhenskaia (1881-1971) is one of few female Soviet directors to have achieved any kind of global renown, both in her own time and since. Yet beyond her best-known film The Women from Riazan Province (Baby riazanskie, 1927), her work remains little studied. This article is not about Preobrazhenskaia as a specifically female director. In fact, her most interesting Soviet-era films were made in a creative partnership with Ivan Pravov. Pravov, some twenty years her junior, began working with Preobrazhenskaia in 1927; they were partners, in life and work, until the mid-1940s. Analyzing The Last Attraction, I will reveal the complex interplay between these two directors' varied but complementary cultural backgrounds. The film can be seen as a reflection on the relationship between political art and entertainment, and as a playful summation of its two directors' experiences over the previous decade: their engagement, as actors and teachers, with the new State Institute of Cinema, and questions of dramatic art. The Last Attraction is a film about bodies, artifice and spectacle; it looks both back to the 1920s and forward to the emerging shapes of Soviet Socialist Realism. It is distinct amidst Preobrazhenskaia and Pravov's oeuvre as an instance of direct engagement with the rapidly changing political environment-to which they fell foul in 1931.
In Evgenii Zamiatin's 1924 novel We, gender is one of the main vehicles for challenging the dystopian One State. The characters O-90, I-330, and eventually D-503 defy what I identify as the One State's hegemonic masculinity, which legitimizes one form of masculinity based on the denigration of feminine and non-traditional masculine identities. D-503 voices the State's misogynistic beliefs, but Zamiatin presents such scenes in ways that encourage readers to interpret his comments critically. Misogyny works as a device to distinguish between propaganda and reality. For example, D-503's idea of femininity proves to be an arbitrary substitute for qualities the State wishes to suppress. The One State's gender ideology thus operates as a system of power meant to force its citizens to conform with its values. Characters' play with gender supports a spectrum of personal expression that facilitates creative exploration and political action. In this paper, I reinterpret O-90's desire for a baby as a radical act of resistance against the State that tries to control her body. I demonstrate how I-330 utilizes gender as a performance meant to provide an alternative to the One State's gender ideology. Finally, I examine how D-503 discovers his individuality and political agency through his evolving experience of gender, expressed through his sexual relationship with I-330 and becoming a metaphorical mother to his text-a journey which parallels O-90's.
Did Arctic/Siberian Indigenous literacy history truly begin with the "introduction" of alphabetic writing by Russian missionaries and Soviet modernizers? This paper challenges that assumption by analyzing the cultures of non-alphabetic writing-specifically, the ideographic and pictographic signs and texts historically and contemporarily prevalent among Indigenous communities across Siberia and the Arctic. We focus particularly on the writing practices of Nenets, an Indigenous Samoyedic group in northern Eurasia, examining their use of signs, drawings, and various text forms. Reflecting on this history, we demonstrate how these practices are "trans-indigenous," in Chadwick Allen's terms, and how they have resisted various forms of colonial dominance while continuing to manifest in Indigenous everyday life. The paper is based on the authors' analysis of Indigenous novels, archival, and field materials.
This article analyzes the first Russian Gothic fiction, "The Island of Bornholm" (1793), written by Nikolai Karamzin (1766-1826), who associated Gothic characters' visual perception with that of the audience in the shadow play, specifically the "Chinese shadow," as well as that of prisoners in Plato's allegory of the cave. It investigates the way in which Karamzin reshapes Plato's cave with Gothic trappings after his visual experience of Chinese Shadows, a popular shadow puppet theater in Paris. I claim that Karamzin poses an epistemological question as to the truthfulness of our perception by using the interplay of light and darkness of Gothic aesthetics, thus creating tension between the known and the unknown. To support this claim, I analyze Karamzin's use of the Gothic dim light, which blurs the protagonist's sight and projects illusory images that cast doubt over what has been observed by the character. Furthermore, by taking into account that the protagonist is not involved in the tragic event on Bornholm but rather merely observes it as a foreign spectator, I distinguish the protagonist from the other contemporary European Gothic heroes involved in the events. The protagonist's distinctive visual perception and role as a spectator reveal the feature of Russian Gothic character's vision that Karamzin understands: a reinterpretation of Plato's epistemological concerns found in his cave allegory, coupled with the evolution of visual entertainments. Finally, by highlighting the fact that even contemporary readers are curious about the aftermath of the story, I argue that readers of "The Island" are also on a search for truth, that is to say, an ongoing epistemological play created by Karamzin.
Focusing on Sergei Shnurov's inheritances from and intertextual references to the Soviet rock tradition, this article examines Leningrad's engagement with the legacy and image of Viktor Tsoi, the icon of late-Soviet countercultural sincerity. Since Tsoi in many ways personified perestroika-era Soviet rock and its underground youth subculture, the present discussion aims to probe Shnurov's intertextual, historical, and ideological relationships to Soviet-era rock music, its major themes, and its defining personalities. Relying on the historical figure and mythology of Tsoi, whose short life serves as a Soviet historical time capsule untarnished by the commercialism of the free-market economy that defined the post-Soviet nineties, Safariants argues that the trajectory of Shnurov's musical celebrity is rooted in an anxiety of influence, which nostalgically reveres yet ultimately fears its Soviet past. The inherent paradox of the historical legacy of Soviet rock music as discursively foundational yet inherently threatening can explain Leningrad's shift from the irreverent punk aesthetic of its early work to the stylistically variegated and ideologically ambivalent musical product that has become the band's trademark in the wake of Russia's neototalitarian turn.
In this article, I consider the work of Sergei Shnurov and the band Leningrad within the discourse of the "civilizational turn" in Russian culture and politics of the 2010s. In following this connection, I pay particular attention to the aesthetics of imperfection, which I propose to analyze not only as an expression of conservative politics, but also as an artistic device characteristic of the metamodernist cultural paradigm. Music videos of the band Leningrad shot between 2015 and 2018 (years of peak popularity for the group), as well interviews with Sergei Shnurov from various periods furnish the material of the study. In the first part of the article, I analyze the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of this period, in order thereafter to describe the phenomenon of aesthetic populism, as well as Shnurov's strategies as an artist and as one of the principal figures of contemporary symbolic politics in Russia.
This article contextualizes Leningrad in relation to the Soviet tradition of cynicism with its gallery of trickster characters. At once embodying a cynical mind and criticizing social cynicism, tricksters are able to both articulate and subvert the hypocrisy of dominant ideologies. In Leningrad's videos produced simultaneously with the first phase of Russia's war against Ukraine and the West (2014-2022), the trickster characters expose a cynical consensus between the authorities and society. While cynicism is an unlikely tool for radical critique, its variety of ambivalence appeared to retain critical political potential while retaining the critical potential. The article registers the symptomatic waning of trickster characters in Shnurov's most recent work, released since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine-the cynical consensus becomes the foundation for the new regime of repressions leaving no room for ambivalence.
By taking a closer look at the cinematic elements in Sergei Shnurov's videos, this article reveals how the viral video language of Leningrad emerged as a result of deconstructing the appeal of Hollywood fantasies. Focusing on Hollywood tropes in videos by Leningrad, I examine how Shnurov's project recycled and deconstructed Western narrative structures by immersing them into the local context. Throughout the 2010s, Leningrad articulated a critique of the Western fantasy from the position of the subject of a subaltern empire, a subject that seeks to invert the structures of domination to experience a sense of superiority. The visual language of Shnurov's clips allowed for an ironic distancing from Hollywood cliches, providing the spectator with the satisfaction of an astute triumph over Hollywood's illusory promises. Reflecting how post-Crimea Russia rethought its relationship with the West, this mode of recycling produced a signature structure that would routinely end with a return to the status quo. Yielding no change for its protagonists, Shnurov's tongue-in-cheek deconstructions of Hollywood genres define the cultural zeitgeist of post-Crimea Russia with its authoritarian enforcement of the political status quo.
This paper uses a celebrity studies lens for perspective on the multiple transformations in Sergei Shnurov's celebrity persona over the last three decades. Following a biographical sketch of the Leningrad frontman, the article expounds upon the academic and popular literature on Shnurov's oeuvre, with special attention to the evolution and eventual decline of his celebrity standing in Russia. Having successfully exploited a few stage images, from a gopnik or a gangster to a truth-speaking trickster who perpetually visits the ugliest corners of both society and human identity, upon Russia's invasion of Ukraine Shnurov retreated to a safe space of neither criticizing nor supporting the status quo. His failure to either contest or clearly endorse those in power during the nation's most challenging times has stripped his celebrity persona of both its signature feature-ambivalence-and its carnivalesque aspect, thus violating the integrity of his image. Such unprecedented indecisiveness in the previously fearless showman, coupled with his withdrawal from the public arena and a pause in the Leningrad concerts, has disrupted his affective connection with his audience. The resulting damage to his celebrity status is evident from fans' reception of his most recent works.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in the voice of a Swiss citizen of mixed French, Austrian, and English descent with precious little awareness of anything Russian. Alien as they may be to the novel's protagonist, Russian concerns are very much on the mind of its author. Using archival research, this study discloses one tangible way in which Lolita integrates Nabokov's Russian cultural heritage by responding to Aleksandr Blok through the mediation of John Keats. Blok's poetry became a formative impression of Nabokov's youth; his discovery of Keats left a lasting mark on his literary sensibility. It is well known that a Russian translator of Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," Nabokov infused Lolita with references to the ballad. The study unlocks a hitherto unknown subtext of these Keatsian references: their close association not only with Blok, but with Nabokov's conflicted attitude toward Blok's narrative poem The Twelve.
This paper examines representations of Ukraine's civil society and community building in artistic documentaries, released in the wake of the post-EuroMaidan national revival, before the full-scale Russian invasion. Drawing on interviews with filmmakers, the paper analyzes the themes and style of Nadia Parfan's cine-symphony Heat Singers (2019) about an amateur folk choir at a municipal heating plant; Oksana Karpovych's atmospheric ethnography of regional commuter trains in Don't Worry, the Doors Will Open (2019); and Oleksiy Radynski's reflections on cultural spaces in Landslide (2016), a portrait of a bohemian art collective, and Infinity According to Florian (2022)-a film about the architecture of the Soviet space age threatened by realty developers. A running thread uniting these films is a quest for a communal public sphere, as well as a reckoning with the legacy of Soviet cultural institutions and material infrastructures. Sensitive to the inequalities and injustices of Ukraine's neoliberal present, these films show what it means to have a community and to build horizontal relationships between generations and diverse social strata. In contextualizing these themes, the paper points to Ukraine's efforts in rediscovering the forgotten and suppressed pages of the past and promoting the country's rich cultural traditions.
This article analyzes the soundtrack of the popular Soviet holiday film Ironiia sud'by: ili s legkim parom! ( Irony of Fate: or Enjoy your Bath!, , 1976, dir. El'dar ' dar Riazanov), the inclusion of Modernist poetry (by Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva) and poetry from the 1960s (by Yevgeny Evtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina) set to song in particular. The article aims to explore the apparent incongruity between "difficult" poetry and popular film. After introducing the film and its musical context in guitar poetry culture, I explore the mechanism I term "folklorization," by which this incongruity is not palpable. Drawing on theoretical insights into Russian Golden Age poetic culture, I argue that the film's soundtrack acts as an al'bom of twentiethcentury Russian poetry and that the late Soviet context of the film echoes the nineteenth-century salon in the pragmatic orientation of poetry. The article then provides two case studies of the poets featured on the soundtrack - Marina Tsvetaeva and Bella Akhmadulina - as illustrations of the mechanisms by which the soundtrack functions. In the case of Tsvetaeva's diptych and most notably "Khochu u zerkala, gde mut'" ("I want to find out from the murky mirror") from the Podruga ("Girlfriend") cycle, I examine how the inclusion of these poems in the film erases the poet's biographical queer identity and subsumes the poem-texts' resistance to patriarchal modes of writing into traditional gender roles. An analysis of Akhmadulina's "Po ulitse moei kotoryi god" ("Along my street every year") showcases the paradoxical nature of late Soviet intelligentsia's sense of community as well as its hermeticism. The conclusion extrapolates on the insights developed from these case studies, bringing them into the larger context of the late Soviet intelligentsia's self-conception and its broader sociocultural implications, considering the role of irony and double-coding.
Thank you all for coming!1 1 It's wonderful to see so many of my friends and colleagues here. I'd like to begin with a couple of acknowledgements. First, over my more than three decades of work at the University of Southern California I had the great privilege and pleasure to work with some brilliant colleagues-including Sally Pratt, Alik Zholkovsky, Tom Seifrid, Olga Matich, John Bowlt, Boris Wolfson, Tatiana Akishina, Jennifer Presto, Kirill Postoutenko, Greta Matzner-Gore, Anna Krakus and others-in our efforts to build a first-class Slavic program. Second, I'd like to thank the many selfless individuals who run AATSEEL and organize these rich and rewarding yearly national conferences, which are a vital productive factor in our scholarly lives.
This article situates Mikhail Kuzmin's 1906 novel Wings in contemporary discussions of visual aesthetics, especially in relation to what Whitney Davis (2010) theorizes as "queer beauty." The article explores Kuzmin's attempt to represent "non-abstract love" between men by navigating the aesthetic extremes of abstraction and idealization, as represented by the Russian Symbolists, and vulgarity and obscenity, as represented in French literature of the time. In particular, the article focuses on two understudied influences, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky's Voskresshie bogi: Leonardo da Vinci (1900), in which wings is a major motif, and Anatole France's Le Lys rouge (1896), the color symbolism of which has much in common with that of Kuzmin's Wings. . Read against these two works and Kuzmin's comments on aesthetics scattered throughout his diary and letters, this article seeks to add nuance to our understanding of the aesthetic positioning of Kuzmin's novel both within the Russian context and within the scene.
