Presentations by Streams

The panel aims to advance our understanding of Russophone literature by applying a variety of approaches to analysing texts by Russophone authors from Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Germany, Israel, Latvia and Uzbekistan. As first theorised by Naomi Caffee (2013), Russophone literature is written by authors who are more than Russian-language speakers, who have hybrid identities and multicultural experiences because they have lived and worked in diverse cultures, whether inside or outside Russia. Furthering this concept, Miriam Finkelstein's paper analyses how contemporary Russophone poets attempt to deconstruct the imperial and colonial legacies of the Russian language, often creating their own identifiably local poetic languages. Alessandro Achille focuses on the ‘Ton’kie linii’ school of contemporary Ukrainian poetry to examine its key themes: memory of the Soviet past, occupation, identity, language choice, multilingualism, and literary traditions. Finally, Klavida Smola examines how northern indigenous minorities in Russia, positioned as simultaneously native and Other, have (re)invented the literary canon from perestroika onwards to reflect their culture’s symbiosis of folklore, local beliefs, indigenous-Christian customs and the Soviet ‘master plot’. Together, the papers will contribute to de-centring the existing Russian literary canons and decolonising the works by putting a spotlight on well-established, marginalised and relatively unknown Russophone authors.