Mar 05, 2026
Writing on the Border in the Post-Stalinist Era - Workshop - March 25, 2026
Time & Date: Wednesday, March 25th, 2026
Format: hybrid - Wiener Str. 48, Room 016 & online via Zoom
About the Workshop
The Soviet Union developed a unique and deeply contradictory system of internal, often invisible, borders: ethnic, linguistic, symbolic, and institutional. Fluid and contested, they fostered both hybrid cultural forms and lasting tensions, making the study of Soviet border-making essential for understanding the conflicts and cultural fractures that followed the collapse of the USSR.
This workshop explores how post-Stalinist literature engaged with the internal borders of the Soviet state. We understand literature as a space where borders are constructed, challenged, and reimagined. Authors writing between languages and cultural traditions often created hybrid narratives that resisted the homogenizing logic of Soviet universalism. We are particularly interested in how literary texts negotiated the contradictions of the “national question” and how border writing or writing on the border reflects and produces liminality, marginality, multiplicity, and shifting subject positions within the late Soviet cultural matrix.
Participation
The workshop will take place in a hybrid format – in presence in Wiener Str. 48, room 016 and online on Zoom.
We cordially invite to participate!
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Zoom-link Meeting-ID: 630 6891 9331 |
Program
| 9:30 - 10:00 | Registration & Coffee |
| 10:00 | Welcome Address Prof. Dr. Klavdia Smola |
| 10:15 | Opening Lecture Borders as Method: Potentials and Limits in the Analysis of Soviet Culture Alena Pantiukhina (TU Dresden) |
| 11:15 - 11:30 | Coffee Break |
| 11:30 | PANEL I TRAVEL WRITING AND THE BORDERING OF SOVIET SPACE |
| 11:30 | Viktor Shklovsky’s Marco Polo and Borders in Central Asia Marina Sivak (FU Berlin) |
| 12:10 | From the Great Game to the Inner Frontier: Youth Adventure Reading and Soviet Border-Making in G. Tushkan’s Djura Anna Gerasimova (Ruhr University Bochum) |
| 12:50 | Bordering Soviet Space: The Volga Travelogue in Gorenstein’s Prose Alena Pantiukhina (TU Dresden) |
| 13:30 - 14:30 | Lunch |
| 14:30 | PANEL II AESTHETIC BORDERS AND CULTURAL REGULATION |
| 14:30 | Affective Borders during De-Stalinisation: Towards the (Cultural) Politics of Voice on Soviet Estrada Arsenii Nikonov (HSE University) |
| 15:10 | A Modernist Writing in a “National Minority Language”: Translating Dovid Hofshteyn, 1956–70 Alexandra Polyan (University of Regensburg) |
| 15:50 - 16:10 | Coffee Break |
| 16:10 | PANEL III BORDER AND TRANSCULTURAL WRITING: CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY |
| 16:10 | Memories of the Borderlands vs. Soviet Internationalism. Transcultural Writing in the Era of Thaw and Stagnation (Vasil′ Bykaŭ, Uladzimir Karatkevič) Ulyana Veryna (University of Bremen) |
| 16:50 | ‘Chuzhaia zemlia, chuzhie liudi, chuzhaia ėpokha!’ Un/covering Internal Borders during Perestroika in Fazil Iskander’s Pshada Elisa Mucciarelli (University of Regensburg) |
| 17:30 - 18:00 | Final Discussion: Borders as Method: Perspectives and Future Directions |