Writing the Twentieth Century in Post-Stalin Russia

About the lecture: This talk will offer an overview of Professor Shevelenko’s current book-length project and will focus on a few case studies. The book examines artistic and intellectual tendencies that shaped the thinking about the “age of extremes” (to use Eric Hobsbawm’s appellation for the twentieth century) during the late Soviet and post-Soviet period. This research analyzes the quest for narrative forms and techniques and, more broadly, representational strategies that the authors chose in order to capture the experience of society and individuals confronting the failure of political modernization and the disruption of social structures. About the speaker: Irina Shevelenko is Professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of CREECA. Her research interests include Russian modernist literature and art, late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, Russian poetry, and nationalism studies. She is the author and editor of several books in English and Russian, including Reframing Russian Modernism (edited volume, 2018) and Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic (2024).