Slavic Review, Summer 2013: A special section on Russian Science FIction

The Summer 2013 issue of Slavic Review is now available. 

Table of Contents can be viewed at http://www.slavicreview.illinois.edu/current/

READING THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE: EARLY SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET RUSSIAN SCIENCE FICTION

Sibelan Forrester and Yvonne Howell, Special Section Guest Editors

ABSTRACTS

How Nauchnaia Fantastika Was Made: The Debates about the Genre of Science Fiction from NEP to High Stalinism

Matthias Schwartz

Based on a detailed analysis of published and unpublished sources, Matthias Schwartz reconstructs the making of Soviet science fiction in the cultural context of Soviet literary politics. Beginning in the 1920s, nauchnaia fantastika (scientific fantasy) became one of the most popular forms of light fiction, though literary critics and activists tended to dismiss it because of its origins in popular adventure, its ties to the so-called Pinkerton literature, and its ambiguous relationship to scientific inventions and social progress. Schwartz’s analysis shows that even during high Stalinism, socialist realism’s norms were far from being firmly established, but in the case of nauchnaia fantastika had to be constantly negotiated and reconstituted as fragile compromises involving different interest groups (literary politicians, writers, publishers, readers). A cultural history of Soviet science fiction also contributes to a better understanding of what people actually wanted to read and sheds new light on the question of how popular literature adapts to political changes and social destabilizations.

Aleksei N. Tolstoi and the Enigmatic Engineer: A Case of Vicarious Revisionism

Muireann Maguire

In this article, Muireann Maguire examines the cultural construction of the trope of the engineer-inventor in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the changing representation of this archetype in three science fiction novels by Aleksei Tolstoi:Aelita (1922–23), Soiuz piati (The Gang of Five, 1925), and Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (Engineer Garin’s Death Ray, 1925–26). Tolstoi’s fiction portrays engineers as misguided and self-centred at best and as amoral, megalomaniacal, and irredeemably un-Soviet at worst. This increasingly negative portrayal of the engineers in these novels, and in their later redactions and cinema versions, helped to prepare the way for the alienation of engineer and technical specialist within Soviet society, providing cultural justification for Iosif Stalin’s show trials and purges of both categories in the 1930s. Tolstoi’s alienation of the engineer-inventor, the traditional hero of early Sovietnauchnaia fantastika (science fiction), prefigured the occlusion of science fiction as a mainstream literary genre. As a trained engineer, former aristocrat, and returned émigré whose own status in Soviet Russia was deeply compromised, Tolstoi’s literary demonization of engineers effectively purchased his own acceptance within the Stalinist literary hierarchy.

One Billion Years after the End of the World: Historical Deadlock, Contemporary Dystopia, and the Continuing Legacy of the Strugatskii Brothers

Sofya Khagi

The importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet science fiction has been thoroughly examined. A less-explored question concerns how they have continued to inspire post-Soviet authors who muse on an environment that differs drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. Sofya Khagi explores how prominent contemporary writers—Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin—examine the Strugatskiis to dramatize their own darker visions of modernization, progress, and morality. They continue the tradition of science fiction as social critique—in this case, a critique of society after the collapse of socialist ideology with its modernizing projects of historical progress, technological development, and social improvement. According to their parables a contrario to the Strugatskiis, the dreams of modernity embodied by the classics of Soviet fantastika have been shattered but not replaced by a viable alternative social scenario. As they converse with their predecessors, contemporary writers examine stagnation, not just in post-Soviet Russia, but in global, postmodern, commodified reality.

Dancing the Nation in the North Caucasus

Sufian Zhemukhov and Charles King

In the north Caucasus, collective dance has long been an expression of communal identity and a forum for political dissent. In this article Sufian Zhemukhov and Charles King examine the emergence and transformation of a communal dance form known as adyge jegu (roughly, “Circassian festival”) in the Russian republics of Adygeia, Karachaevo-Cherkesia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. They chart the history of the adyge jegu after 2005, elucidate debates over the meaning of authenticity in contemporary Circassian nationalism, and provide a detailed archaeology of the specific decisions that enabled this cultural artifact to get constructed in one way but not another. While attention typically focuses on elite-driven narratives of border security and terrorism, the adyge jegu highlights grass-roots debates over the meaning of right behavior, the boundaries of communal identity, and alternatives to Russianness in either its russkii or rossiiskii varieties.

Stories States Tell: Identity, Narrative, and Human Rights in the Balkans

Jelena Subotić

Jelena Subotić explores how the states of the Balkans construct their “autobiographies”—stories about themselves—and how these stories influence their contemporary political choices. By understanding where states’ narratives about themselves—stories of their past, their historical purpose, their role in the international system—come from, we can more fully explain contemporary state behavior that to outsiders may seem irrational, self-defeating, or simply, inexplicable. Subotić specifically addresses ways in which states of the western Balkans have built their state narratives around the issue of human rights. She explores, first, how a particular narrative of state and national identity produced—or made locally comprehensible—massive human rights abuses. She then analyzes why contemporary identity narratives make postconflict human rights policies very difficult to institutionalize. The article focuses specifically on the human rights discourse, practices, and debates in Serbia and Croatia.

Socialist Popular Literature and the Czech-German Split in Austrian Social Democracy, 1890–1914

Jakub Beneš

By 1911 it was clear that multiethnic Austrian Social Democracy could no longer resist the currents of ethnic nationalism that had already fragmented most of the late Habsburg political scene. The exit that year of most Czech Social Democrats to form their own party, along with Austrian Germans’ insensitive reactions, signaled that workers were not immune to nationalism. The relevant historical literature has either viewed workers’ nationalism as the product of elite manipulation and “bourgeois” influence, or, more recently, has questioned the extent to which nationalism actually resonated with ordinary people at society’s grassroots. Jakub Beneš’s article attempts to avoid the oversimplifications of both approaches and calls for more precise engagement with workers’ own discourse. To this end, it highlights an important dimension of working-class political culture—socialist popular literature—in which proletarian authors articulated increasingly ethnic nationalist positions of a class-specific sort. Examining this influential but neglected genre illuminates how and under what circumstances workers found meaning in nationalism.

FEATURED REVIEWS

Jörn Leonhard and Ulrike von Hirschhausen, eds., Comparing Empires: Encounters and Transfers in the Long Nineteenth Century (Mark von Hagen)  352

Mark Cornwall, The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha (Chad Bryant)  357

Ante Lešaja, Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjige u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih (Robert M. Hayden)  361

Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Anne Nesbet)  364

FILM REVIEW

Maple Razsa and Pancho Velez, dirs., Bastards of Utopia (Dušan I. Bjelić)  368

BOOK REVIEWS

Brian L. Davies, ed., Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1500–1800 (Lawrence Sondhaus)  370

Elena V. Baraban, Stephan Jaeger, and Adam Muller, eds., Fighting Words and Images: Representing War across the Disciplines (Stephen M. Norris)  371

Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller, eds., Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Europe (Karl Qualls)  373

Stefan Troebst and Johanna Wolf, eds., Erinnern an den Zweiten Weltkrieg: Mahnmale und Museen in Mittel- und Osteuropa (Christina Morina)  374

Jacques Semelin, Claire Andrieu, and Sarah Gensburger, eds., Resisting Genocide: The Multiple Forms of Rescue, trans. Emma Bentley and Cynthia Schoch (Joanna B. Michlic)  376

Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies (Anthony Kemp-Welch)  378

Tomislav Z. Longinović, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary (Vedrana Veličković)  379

Hilde Katrine Haug, Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia: Tito, Communist Leadership and the National Question (John V. A. Fine)  381

Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory (Lidia Santarelli)  382

Andrzej Nowak, Imperiological Studies: A Polish Perspective (Alexey Miller)  383

Jochen Böhler and Stephan Lehnstaedt, eds., Gewalt und Alltag im besetzten Polen 1939–1945 (Catherine Epstein)  384

Iris Engemann, Die Slowakisierung Bratislavas: Universität, Theater und Kultusgemeinden, 1918–1948 (Peter Bugge)  386

Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania, trans. Yaffah Murciano, ed. Leon Volovici, with the assistance of Miriam Caloianu (Vladimir Solonari)  387

Olga Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (K. E. Fleming)  389

Marek Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (Annette Insdorf)  390

Aurelia Vasile, Le cinéma roumain dans la période communiste: Représentations de l’histoire nationale (Marcel Cornis-Pope)  391

Anne Quinney, ed., Paris-Bucharest, Bucharest-Paris: Francophone Writers from Romania (Keith Hitchins)  393

Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, ed., Transitions of Lithuanian Postmodernism: Lithuanian Literature in the Post-Soviet Period (Diana Spokiene)  394

Charles S. Kraszewski, Irresolute Heresiarch: Catholicism, Gnosticism and Paganism in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz (Tadeusz Slawek)  396

Mark Andryczyk, The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (Myroslav Shkandrij)  397

Martina Baleva, Bulgarien im Bild: Die Erfindung von Nationen auf dem Balkan in der Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts (Matthew Rampley)  398

Matthew Rampley, ed., Heritage, Ideology, and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe: Contested Pasts, Contested Presents (Jim Aulich)  400

Huub van Baar and Ingrid Commandeur, eds., Museutopia: A Photographic Research Project by Ilya Rabinovich (Jennifer Cash)  401

John Downey and Sabina Mihelj, eds., Central and Eastern European Media in Comparative Perspective: Politics, Economy and Culture (Peter Gross)  402

Tassilo Herrschel, Borders in Post-Socialist Europe: Territory, Scale, Society (Joni Virkkunen)  404

Armina Galijaš, Eine bosnische Stadt im Zeichen des Krieges: Ethnopolitik und Alltag in Banja Luka (1990–1995) (Ivo Banac)  405

Ohannes Geukjian, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the South Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Legacy of Soviet Nationalities Policy (Brian Glyn Williams)  407

Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court of Peter the Great, 1689–1725 (James Cracraft)  408

Kati Parppei, “The Oldest One in Russia”: The Formation of the Historiographical Image of Valaam Monastery (Scott Kenworthy)  409

I. A. Khristoforov, Sud<’>ba reformy: Russkoe krest<’>ianstvo v pravitel<’>stvennoi politike do i posle otmeny krepostnogo prava (1830–1890-e gg.) (Tracy Dennison)  410

S. Iu. Malysheva, Prazdnyi den<’>, dosuzhii vecher: Kul<’>tura dosuga rossiiskogo provintsial<’>nogo goroda vtoroi poloviny XIX–nachala XX veka (Susan Smith-Peter)  412

Walter Sperling, Der Aufbruch der Provinz: Die Eisenbahnen und die Neuordnung der Räume im Zarenreich (Reinhard Nachtigal)  413

Uyama Tomohiko, ed., Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts (Steven Sabol)  414

Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov, eds., Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Robert D. Crews)  416

David Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Matthew E. Lenoe)  417

Robert Service, Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution (Rex A. Wade)  418

David Stahel, Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East (Kenneth Slepyan)  420

Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Denise J. Youngblood)  421

Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (Alexander Hill)  422

Geoffrey Roberts, Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior (Eric Duskin)  423

Elena Agarossi and Victor Zaslavsky, Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War (Spencer M. Di Scala)  425

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Conscience on Trial: The Fate of Fourteen Pacifists in Stalin’s Ukraine, 1952–1953 (Robert H. Greene)  426

Rosamund Bartlett and Sarah Dadswell, eds., Victory over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera (Charlotte Douglas)  427

Susanne Marten-Finnis, Der Feuervogel als Kunstzeitschrift: Žar ptica. Russische Bildwelten in Berlin 1921–26 (John E. Bowlt)  429

Jean-Paul Bronckart and Cristian Bota, Bakhtine démasqué: Histoire d’un menteur, d’une escroquerie et d’un délire collectif (Karine Zbinden)  430

M. [Maksim] P. Marusenkov, Absurdopediia russkoi zhizni Vladimira Sorokina: Zaum<’>, grotesk i absurd (Ulrich Schmid)  431

David-Emil Wickström, “Okna otkroi!”—“Open the Windows!” Transcultural Flows and Identity Politics in the St. Petersburg Popular Music Scene, foreword, Yngvar B. Steinholt (Sergei I. Zhuk)  433

Jarrett Zigon, ed., Multiple Moralities and Religions in Post-Soviet Russia (Milena Benovska-Sabkova)  434

Alicja Curanović, The Religious Factor in Russia’s Foreign Policy (Anastasia Mitrofanova)  436

Helene Carlba¨ck, Yulia Gradskova, and Zhanna Kravchenko, eds., And They Lived Happily Ever After: Norms and Everyday Practices of Family and Parenthood in Russia and Eastern Europe (Deborah A. Field)  437

Olena Hankivsky and Anastasiya Salnykova, eds., Gender, Politics, and Society in Ukraine; Marian J. Rubchak, ed., Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Contemporary Ukraine (Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak)  439

Otto Luchterhandt, ed., Rechtskultur in Russland: Tradition und Wandel (Peter B. Maggs)  441

Genri Khail [Henry E. Hale] and Ivan Kurilla, eds., Rossiia “dvukhtysiachnykh”: Stereoskopicheskii vzgliad (Stephen White)  442

Andrew Wilson, Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship (Lucan Way)  444

COLLECTED ESSAYS 446

OTHER BOOKS OF INTEREST 449

IN MEMORIAM 451