Russians Abroad Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora (1919-1939) [Paperback]

This book presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues: with the emerging Soviet Union and with the dizzying world of European modernism that surrounded them in the West. The book's chapters address generational differences, literary polemics and experimentation, the heritage of pre-October Russian modernism, and the fate of individual writers and critics, offering a sweeping view of how exiles created a literary diaspora. The discussion moves beyond Russian studies to contribute to todays broad, cross-cultural study of the creative side of political and cultural displacement. Greta Slobin's highly illuminating study on Russian emigre writing of the 1920s-1940s is an important contribution to the area of Russian twentieth-century studies. Its conceptually sophisticated theoretical framework enables Slobin to offer significant insights into the artistic imagination, memory wars and cultural politics of the most influential representatives of Russian diaspora, including Bunin, Remizov, Nabokov, Tsvetaeva and Adamovich. Being well aware of the importance of the Pushkin myth and the Doestoevsky myth to the construction of the national identity among Russian emigre communities, Slobin suggests that the re-discovery of the works of Ivan Turgenev in the 1930s enabled Russian emigre authors in France to preserve the sense of cultural continuity. In an impressive way, Slobin manages to elucidate many complexities associated with the reception of Russian emigre culture of the first wave in the post-Soviet Period. It is likely to be an indispensable source of information on Russian diaspora of the 1920s-40s for many years tol-