Authors

Alexey Shvyrkov¹;  ¹ Columbia University, United States

Discussion

This paper will examine the genre of autofiction as a postcolonial mode of writing that allows authors to navigate the complexities of their hybrid identities. The collapse of the Soviet Union constituted a collective traumatic experience that destroyed previously established social links and identity formations. As an outcome, post-Soviet culture, bound by the newly (re)emerged national mythologies on the one hand and dysfunctional Soviet cultural traditions and new post-Soviet cultural practices, on the other, created a condition of post-Soviet hybridity. German Sadulaev and Bibish’s works are structured by the expectations regarding their inferior positionality vis-à-vis the dominant culture. German Sadulaev's I am a Chechen (2006) features fragmented narratives that incorporate elements of Sadulaev’s own biography. The oscillations between different “selves” that do not belong anywhere inhabit Sadulaev’s prose where doubles and tricksters fragment the narratives highlighting the traumatic postcolonial condition. This paper will address the following paradox: as Sadulaev uncovers the invented nature of traditions and narratives, he is melancholic about losing the sense of belonging that the Soviet ideology provided. Bibish in The Dancer from Khiva (2004), on the other hand, strategically mimics Soviet tropes centered around the liberation of a “woman of the East” to assert agency in shaping the representation of the Other. In the beginning, Bibish’s liberation is animated not necessarily by the wish to escape the oppressor, but rather by extricating herself from the confines of indigenous patriarchy of her kishlak. However, the strategy of “naive writing” creates an effect of estrangement that allows Bibish to reveal the emptiness behind Russian discourses of superiority, effectively transcending what Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks characterized as the psychopathological condition prevalent in the psyche of the colonized.