October 1, Book Party for Greta Slobin's RUSSIANS ABROAD

[Ronald Meyer]

OCTOBER 1, 2013. HARRIMAN INSTITUTE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
5:00 P.M. HARRIMAN ATRIUM

Come celebrate the publication of Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural
Politics of Diaspora by Greta Slobin (1943-2011), published thus summer by
Academic Studies Press. Greta was a Senior Research Fellow at the Russian
Institute, Columbia University, in 1980-1981 and a Visiting Scholar at the
Harriman Institute, Columbia University, in 1996. She taught at SUNY-Albany,
Amherst College, University of California-Santa Cruz and Wesleyan
University. Her book, Remizov¹s Fictions: 1900-1921, was published in
Studies of the Harriman Institute by Northern Illinois University Press in
1991.



Greta Slobin, Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora
(1919-1939)
Edited by Katerina Clark, Nancy Condee, Dan Slobin, Mark Slobin
Russians Abroad presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and
literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October
Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris
under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the
political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers
carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues: with the emerging Soviet
Union and with the dizzying world of European modernism that surrounded them
in the West. Chapters address generational differences, literary polemics
and experimentation, the heritage of pre-October Russian modernism, and the
fate of individual writers and critics, offering a sweeping view of how
exiles created a literary diaspora. The discussion moves beyond Russian
studies to contribute to today¹s broad, cross-cultural study of the creative
side of political and cultural displacement.

Praise for Russians Abroad:

³Greta Slobin¹s highly illuminating study on Russian emigre writing of the
1920s­1940s is an important contribution to the area of Russian
twentieth-century studies. Its conceptually sophisticated theoretical
framework enables Slobin to offer significant insights into the artistic
imagination, memory wars and cultural politics of the most influential
representatives of Russian diaspora, including Bunin, Remizov, Nabokov,
Tsvetaeva and Adamovich. Being well aware of the importance of the Pushkin
myth and the Dostoevsky myth to the construction of the national identity
among Russian emigre communities, Slobin suggests that the re-discovery of
the works of Ivan Turgenev in the 1930s enabled Russian emigre authors in
France to preserve the sense of cultural continuity. In an impressive way,
Slobin manages to elucidate many complexities associated with the reception
of Russian emigre culture of the first wave in the post-Soviet Period. It is
likely to be an indispensable source of information on Russian diaspora of
the 1920s­40s for many years to come.²  ‹Alexandra Smith, Edinburgh
University
Academic Studies Press, 2013
<http://www.academicstudiespress.com/SlavicNew.aspx>




Ronald Meyer
Adjunct Associate Professor
Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University

Communications Manager
Harriman Institute
Columbia University
420 West 118th Street, Rm. 1216
MC 3345
New York, NY 10027
212 854-6218; 212 666-3481 (fax)





-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                        http://seelangs.wix.com/seelangs
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/seelang/attachments/20130927/cd2d69e1/attachment.html>