What Comes after “Post- Soviet” in Russian Studies? The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Buckler, Julie A. 2009. What comes after “Post-Soviet” in Russian studies? PMLA 124(1): 251-263. Published Version doi:10.1632/pmla.2009.124.1.251 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4341694 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA 234.2 ] the changing profession What Comes after “Post- Soviet” in Russian Studies? RUSSIAN STUDIES ARE STILL IN LOVE WITH THEIR FASCINATING AND UN- PREDICTABLE SUBJECT, DESPITE RADICALLY CHANGING GEOPOLITICAL ()*+, -. .)/0*,1 realities and shifts in the academic climate. We in the field have been through something resembling the free-market shock therapy prescribed for newly non- Soviet Russia, a major shake- up in intel- lectual orientation and logistics. Our methodologies, perspectives, and projects are always in this sense a re!ection of our present- day subject, but they are also a self- portrait, the latest in a series." Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, Western scholars of Russia have variously characterized the imperial era, but they have nearly always viewed the past as pre#guring the (Soviet or post- Soviet) pres- ent, casting the present moment as overdetermined. $e censorship and repression of the imperial period seemingly rendered inevitable the violations of human rights during the Soviet period. In the im- mediate a%ermath of 1991, Western specialists focused on the end of the imperial period, on nascent capitalism and commercial culture, #nding Russia to have been much more like us than we had imag- ined, our a&nity with it interrupted by seventy- plus years of Soviet rule and restored in the cultural climate of post- Soviet Russia. How do Russian studies make sense now, a%er the cold war, in the larger context of globalization? Does the discourse on postcolonialism apply in our case? Has the “ post- Soviet” moment come and gone? Where Have We Been All These Years? Just as Soviet citizens were used to paying unchanging prices for basic items—a loaf of bread, a metro token—scholars of Russian lit- erature and culture in the United States long relied on seeming con- JULIE A. BUCKLER, professor of Slavic lan- stants in their professional and intellectual lives. One disciplinary guages and literatures at Harvard Uni ver- sity, is the author of Mapping St. Pe ters burg: truism held that literature in repressive nineteenth- century Russia Imperial Text and Cityshape (Prince ton UP, compensated for the lack of a developed “public sphere” and pro- 2005). Her current project is titled “Cul- vided a forum for debating social and political issues.' $e tenets of tural Properties: The Afterlife of the Impe- socialist realism made literature no less central, casting state writers rial in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia.” [ © 3556 .7 89, :;<,1= *-=>)->, -??;/+-8+;= ;@ -:,1+/- ] 3A2 CDC What Comes after “Post-Soviet” in Russian Studies? [ PMLA as “engineers of the human soul.”B $e much with the seeming nineteenth- century roman- mythologized dissenting Russian writer and tic quaintness of national language and litera- the idealized Russian- intelligentsia reader ture programs (Platt 209). But studying these were a matched pair, willing to risk life for the literatures, at least for American specialists, profession sake of literature and its truth- telling mission was not simply a project of nationalist self- (Todd, “Russian Literature” 31–32). celebration, since our purpose arose from the $e “Aesopian language” of nineteenth- importance of literature, both demonstrated century Russian literature gradually evolved and perceived, in the sociopolitical environ- changing into the complex intertextuality of the twen- ment of modern Russia. A%er 1991, it became tieth century, a code known to insiders and easier for scholars to obtain visas to Russia, the specialists. Literature was accorded special but the rising cost of books in the new Russia status as the only discourse sophisticated and (not to mention the lack of time to read them) elusive enough to convey dangerous essential made literature seem more a luxury than a meanings and preserve them for future gen- moral and spiritual necessity. $us, scholars erations. Products (by birth or training) of a exploring the rampant post- Soviet nostalgia cultural context that so elevated literature’s in Russia themselves harbor a complicated role, Russian- literature specialists in the mix of feelings toward the Soviet past. United States devoted themselves to studying, A newly skeptical awareness of litera- publishing, and translating endangered texts, ture’s function in the larger cultural contexts creating a canon counter to the o&cial literary of imperial, Soviet, and post- Soviet Russia has canon of the Soviet Union (Emerson, “Slavic overtaken us. Recent studies of readership ex- Studies” 450). It has been remarked more than amine the wishful aspects of the familiar my- once that the iron curtain separated us from thology: the reading public as a construct, a our counterparts in other American humani- fantasy created by the intelligentsia and the ties departments, but that selfsame curtain government in curious collaboration. When also drew us (literary specialists and histo- the government controlled publication, print rians in particular) into a vivid, multidisci- runs, and dissemination, books became a plinary area-studies constellation (Steiner; see permanently scarce commodity, even a fetish, also Clark, “Beyond the Wall”). objects of desire for Soviet readers, who av- By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had idly collected and displayed them (in pursuit dissolved and the former republics declared of “complete collected works” to adorn living their independence, the Russian republic room bookshelves [Lovell]). $e dominance among the #rst. For Russian specialists too, of state production as well as the valoriza- our reality became history, and it seemed tion of anything “uno&cial” made it di&cult that our present was comprehensible only as to identify readers’ tastes during the Soviet a%ermath. Area studies in general have suf- period, whereas in the post- Soviet era we are fered decline and downsizing, but Soviet and faced with an explosion of diverse reading post- Soviet studies were particularly hard-hit, matter and a proliferation of small private and the historical, geopolitical, and cultural publishers, a situation harking back in many Russo- centrism of what remains has been sub- respects to the late imperial years. jected to sharp internal critique by scholars of $e culturally privileged position of writ- Ukraine and Belarus, central and southeast- ers in Russia and across the former Soviet ern Europe, and central Asia. Russian—not bloc has succumbed to the changing literary to mention Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian— marketplace, and these present conditions literary studies in the twenty- first-century also provoke us to reevaluate the past (Wach- Anglo-American academy must now contend tel). Russian literary specialists have become 234.2 Julie A. Buckler CDF ] the more self- conscious about the construction the study of literature was a science, and the and perpetuation of the giant-writer cults work of structuralist theorists such as Ro- changing (Pushkin, Tolstoy) so dominant in modern man Ja kob son pointed the way beyond our Russian cultural history.E $e practices gov- traditional philological and textological fo- erning the formation of o&cial and uno&cial cus toward discourse and cultural studies. literary canons have come under increasing We now look to a more diverse set of theo- profession scrutiny, as has the pervasive presence of the retical and disciplinary frameworks, past political in the Russian literary sphere. Kath- our adored Russian formalists, Prague struc- leen Parthé examines the tradition of pro- turalists, Bakhtin circle, and Moscow- Tartu ducing and distributing texts outside o&cial cultural semioticians. channels as well as Russian readers’ compul- We are searching for new ways to under- sive search for subversive messages in artistic stand historical periods, social formations, and works. Parthé’s study urges a more nuanced artistic genres, beyond the boundedness of our approach to samizdat, or self- published lit- old paradigms. Jehanne Gheith, for example, erature (not always artistic or dangerous) addresses the absence of major nineteenth- and to o&cially published work (not always century prose- writing women in the Russian fully in support of state ideology or policy). literary canon. Why was there no Russian Jane She brings into relief ten historically power- Austen or Madame de Staël, no Russian Brontës, ful “beliefs” about literature in Russia, among George Sand, George Eliot, or Virginia Woolf? these that Russians read more than any other In a manner that bears directly on canon for- people and that literature formed national mation, Gheith investigates the politics of pro- identity in Russia. Related to these beliefs ducing scholarly editions, complete collected is the notion that censorship in Russia pro- works, and translations, as well as the lower duced a particularly sensitive and receptive prestige accorded literary forms, such as autobi- reader whose imagination was stimulated by ography and novella, that women writers chose the search for hidden meanings (Holquist 14). more o%en than the novel and short story. Simi- This complex of literature- centered beliefs, larly, in my book Mapping St. Petersburg I argue mythologies, and practices seems unlikely to that the vaunted and purportedly dominant survive in the post- Soviet cultural climate. “neoclassical style” of imperial Saint Petersburg Topics have been deheroicized; terms was an insistent fantasy that lingered from the are no longer absolute. In a 1998 survey of time of the Napoleonic wars through the Soviet the state of the field, William Mills Todd period.