http://decadenceorrenaissance.com/programme/





Introduction



Decadence or Renaissance? brings together scholars from across the world to assess and explore the last twenty years of Russian literature. They will be joined by two celebrated writers of this period, Mikhail Shishkin and Vladimir Sharov, both shortly to be published in English for the first time. The keynote lectures will be given by Mark Lipovetsky, the acknowledged authority on Russian postmodernism, and Irina Prokhorova, the scholar and editor whose publishing ventures have definitively shaped the post-Soviet cultural landscape.



Among the participants at the conference are renowned specialists from Europe and America, young scholars and translators, editors at Russian literary and cultural journals, and critics who are also major poets and authors in their own right. It is hoped that Decadence or Renaissance? will appeal to all who are interested in how one of the great literary traditions in the world has assimilated the dramatic developments of the recent past.



The topics for discussion include new aesthetic strategies in prose and poetry; ideological tendencies in contemporary literature; the relationship between national identity and natural resources; and the recent blossoming of émigré authors writing in both Russian and English.



All are welcome to register and attend.



Programme



All lectures and panels to be held in the Nissan Lecture Theatre, St Antony’s.



All events to be held in English unless otherwise stated. Order and timings are provisional and will be definitively confirmed by August 20 at the latest.

Monday 24 September

9-10 am 	Registration and coffee, Hilda Besse Building, St Antony’s

10.15 	Introductory remarks by Oliver Ready

10.30 	Keynote Lecture

Mark Lipovetsky (Boulder, Colorado)

‘Simplicity’, ‘Complexity’, and Trauma in Post-Soviet (and Soviet) Literature

11.45 	Keynote Lecture

Irina Prokhorova (New Literary Review)

To be confirmed

12.45 	Lunch, Hilda Besse Building

13.45-15.10 	

Session 1

The Literary Process: Forums and Polemics (Chair: Bradley Gorski)



Olga Breininger-Umetayeva (Oxford): Literature and Ideology after 1991



Evgeniya Vorobyeva [Vejlian] (Russian State Humanitarian University, Moscow; Znamya): The Paradox of the ‘Thick Journals’



Elisa Baglioni (Siena): Contemporary Russian Poetry and the Literary Process in Post-Soviet Russia

15.20-16.45 	

Session 2

Émigré Literature: New Waves? (Chair: Alexander Etkind)



Inna Mineeva (Karelian State Pedagogical Academy): Emigration as a Theme in Contemporary Russian literature (Z. Zinik and K. Kobrin)



Margarita Levantovskaya (University of California, San Diego): Between Two Diasporas: Jewish Emigration in Post-Soviet Fiction (L. Ulitskaya, A. Ulinich and others)



Marina Aptekman (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, NY): The ‘Other’ in the New Russian Émigré Writing (D. Rubina and M. Shishkin)

16.45 	Coffee Break

17.15-18.45 	Keynote speech by the novelist Mikhail Shishkin followed by a conversation with Zinovy Zinik and questions from the audience; concluding with a reading, in Russian, from Pis’movnik (The Letter-Book), accompanied by an excerpt from Andrew Bromfield’s forthcoming translation

19.30 	Conference Dinner, Hilda Besse Building

Tuesday 25 September

9.00-10.45 	

Session 3

Unstable Realities (Chair: Anna Ljunggren)



Maria Galina (Moscow; Novy Mir): ‘Reality Shifts’ in Women’s Prose of the early 1990s as a Herald of the ‘New Consciousness’



Uilleam Blacker (Cambridge): Memories of Vanished Others: Yury Buida as a Central European Writer



Alexandra Smith (Edinburgh), Life as Literary Device: Liudmila Petrushevskaya’s Many Selves



Nina Kolesnikoff (McMaster, Ontario): Viktor Pelevin’s T: A Postmodern Menippean Satire

10.45 	Coffee Break

11.15-12.45 	

Session 4

Poetic Mutations (Chair: Alexandra Smith)



Yulia Valieva (St Petersburg State University): The Ways of Unofficial Saint-Petersburg/Leningrad Poetry in the 1990s



Ilya Kukulin (Moscow): An Approach to Metaphoric Processes in Contemporary Russian poetry



Arkady Shtypel’ (Moscow): Time of Mutagenesis: New Strategies in Modern Poetry

12.45 	Lunch, Hilda Besse Building

14.00-15.30 	

Session 5

Natural Riches and Lost Futures (Chair: TBC)



Ilya Kalinin (St Petersburg State University): Matter and Memory: Oil in the Post-Soviet Unconscious



Rachel Polonsky (Cambridge): Literary Form and Geographical Formlessness: National Space in the Works of Dmitry Bykov and Vladimir Sorokin



Alexander Etkind (Cambridge): Historicizing the Future: Mourning and Warning in the Fiction of Alexei Slapovsky and Others

15.30 	Coffee Break

16.00-17.30 	

Session 6

Case-Study: Vladimir Sharov’s novel Do i vo vremya (Before and During, 1993) (Chair: Mark Lipovetsky)



Presentation on the novel by Oliver Ready (Oxford)



Comments by Vladimir Sharov, and a reading by him from Do i vo vremya (with on-screen translation)



Collective discussion

18.15-19.45 	Reception, Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre Library, Main Building, St Antony’s

Wednesday 26 September

9.00-10.30 	

Session 7

The Political and the Personal (Chair: Ilya Kukulin)



Maria Hristova (Yale): Between Fact and Fiction: Autobiography and Documentalization in Contemporary Russian Literature



Andrei Rogatchevski (Glasgow): Counter-Culture, Limonov-Style: A Blessing or a Plague?



Anna Potsar (St Petersburg State University): The Russian Political Novel (2000-2010): Journalism, Parody, Metautopia

10.30 	Coffee Break

11.00-12.30 	

Session 8

Speech and Voice (Chair: Rachel Polonsky)



Bradley Gorski (Columbia): In Others’ Words: Hosting Third-Party Speech in V. Sorokin’s Goluboe salo (Blue Lard) and M. Shishkin’s Venerin volos (Maidenhair)



Anna Ljunggren (Stockholm): An Anonymous Voice as an Aesthetic Category: Lev Rubinshtein’s ‘Staircase of Beings’ (‘Lestnitsa sushchestv’)



Zinovy Zinik: TBA

12.30 	Concluding Remarks