Events

What is an afterlife? Flickering elusively or persisting durably across centuries and geographic borders, an idea or a cultural artefact takes on different meanings across time. These inflections are tied to hermeneutic practices and the contexts in which they emerge, as well as vagaries of taste, politics, and human folly. Understood and manifested variously as influence, legacy, intertext, citation, or copy, an afterlife can have material and conceptual consequences that haunt or invigorate readers and writers. Inextricably tied to the passage of time, an afterlife is a resurgence, rediscovery, or reconstruction of cultural patrimony, which can trigger excitement, confusion, or resistance.

“Russian Afterlives of the Early Modern” aims to stir reflection on how practices of re-reading, re-writing, and otherwise making meaning anew–commonly grouped under the rubric of reception studies–have operated in Russophone culture. While scholars frequently allude to Derrida’s Spectre of Marx to speak of Soviet-era traumas that haunt post-Soviet cultural production, a constructive framework for analysing the long tail of the early modern period remains under-theorized.

We invite contributions that engage with the modern Russian afterlives of eastern Slavic culture from the 16th-18th centuries. We offer the following questions to stimulate reflection:

How has historical periodization taken shape in Russian cultural memory and in the field of Slavic Studies? Does it even make sense to apply the standard European periodization of “the early modern period” to the Slavic world, where the Middle Ages are often assumed to have ended at the turn of the eighteenth century?

Why have Russians looked back to the early modern period, and what have they found there?

How has the early modern period offered later writers, artists, thinkers, and politicians a lens through which to articulate or re-examine their own contemporary realities?

How has the pre-national character of the period been recognized?

How did the early modern period become marginalized or erased from cultural memory and what consequences has this had?

Have interpretative approaches to eastern Slavic early modern culture differed between anglophone and russophone scholars?

In addition to appropriations or productive reinterpretations of the early modern, have there been conscious (or subconscious) and outright rejections of certain cultural traits of the early modern?

Have non-verbal forms of early modern cultural expression such as music and art been overlooked in favour of textual documents?

What place does reception studies occupy in the field of Slavic? How can its methodological perspective help us to rethink standard narratives about the Russian cultural tradition?