Authors

Discussion

Anthropogenic climate change necessitates rethinking the role of academic scholarship. This paper addresses the question of Soviet subjecthoods from the perspective of one’s affective connection to natural environments, while keeping in mind the multiscalarity of subjecthood. It traces a genealogy of environmentally-attuned selfhoods in the late Soviet-era sociocultural imagination and positions this model within the context of present-day understandings of subjecthood in Soviet studies. I turn to environmentally attuned considerations by two important authors of the late Soviet years – the Latvian novelist Alberts Bels and the Estonian poet and essayist Jaan Kaplinski. 

Soviet-era subjects did not make sense of their lives, aims and accomplishments solely in relation to the Soviet state, but also in relation to things closer at hand and in relation to ideas and conditions of a global and planetary scale. In Alberts Bels’s and Jaan Kaplinski’s writings, the environmentally conscious subject emerges as multiscalar: a subject who identifies both with its direct, affectively experienced environment, but who also realizes the boundedness of local, global and planetary processes. The ethical attitude reverence for life, promoted by Albert Schweitzer, together with the widely shared concern about both local local-level environmental damage and the future of the planet provide the context for late Soviet multiscalar naturecultural subjecthood.