The Center at the Periphery: Eccentric Identity in Contemporary Russian Writing
FAIN: FT-53500-05
Edith W. Clowes
University of Virginia (Lawrence, KS 66045-7505)
This five-chapter book project addresses symbolic geographies and identity in contemporary Russian writing culture. It examines the process of cultural regeneration in post-Soviet Russia and emerging articulations of identity that move beyond the traumas of the post-Soviet movement. I have found a pattern of movement away from the old center of Soviet ideology in Moscow to "peripheral" symbolic-geographical spaces that free the writer to prove alternate writing forms and articulations of identity. In Summer 2005 I will focus on the novel, "Chapaev and Emptiness" ("Chapaev i pustota," 1996), by Viktor Pelevin, his quarrel with globalization, and his interest in Buddhism and East Asia as an alternate geographical locus of the mind.
Media Coverage
Radio Liberty Interview (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Aleksandr Sirotin
Publication: Radio Liberty
Date: 9/25/2011
Abstract: This is a telephone interview on the book and my views on the intellectual and political atmosphere in Putin's Russia.
URL: http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/article/24338466.html
"Rossiia eto--periferiia? Interview s Edith Clowes" (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Aleksandr Sirotin
Publication: Chaika
Date: 9/16/2011
Abstract: This is a longer version of the Radio Liberty interview. In Russian.
"Imperiia pustoty: v poiskakh utrachennoi periferii" (Russian: "The Empire of Emptiness: In Search of the Lost Margin" (Review)
Author(s): Dmitrii Zamiatin
Publication: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie
Date: 11/1/2011
Abstract: This is a lengthy and careful review of Russia on the Edge, strongly urging its translation into Russian.
URL: http://www.nlobooks.ru/rus/magazines/nlo/196/2556/2587/