Reframing Russophonia: Reflections of Nation, Land, and Self

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Russian-language cultural production has participated in the formation and redefinition of national identity in some late Soviet and post-Soviet cultural spaces. Through case studies focused on Kazakhstan and Belarus, it argues that Russophone literature offers a productive vantage onto how the Russian language has been used to explore and shape place-based belonging in moments of collective transformation. The introduction highlights how the study of Russophone literature can be oriented toward shared cultural ambivalence and its relation to literary images of the contemporary post-Soviet nation. Examination of Russophonia’s origins, problems, and possibilities reveals the tradition as shaped by both Soviet cultural legacies and localized postcolonial reckoning. When oriented toward national context, Russophone literature offers a promising framework for discussing the Russian language’s role in negotiating new collective identities as they emerged in the post-Soviet period and as they continue to adapt to changing cultural realities. Chapter One recounts how antinuclear activism and Russophone literary culture became intertwined in Kazakhstan during Perestroika and in the first years after independence. It analyzes how the Russophone poet Olzhas Suleimenov drew on decades of internationalist and postcolonial literary discourse in orienting the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement; how Sergei Shafir’s documentary films aestheticized the movement’s rhetoric to create a new symbolic language; and how Rollan Seisenbayev used Russian-language fiction, translation, and canon-building ventures to inscribe nuclear catastrophe into a revised narrative of the republic’s Soviet history. Russian emerges as a powerful medium through which writers and artists documented suffering and mobilized public demonstrations, all the while reimagining Kazakhstan’s Soviet past toward new, rehabilitated cultural futures. Chapter Two examines how Russophone and formerly Russophone writers from Belarus have contended with displacement, state violence, and changing language practices in the wake of post-2020 repressions and Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. The chapter traces how burgeoning language identities in emigration, including the “new speaker” of Belarusian and the “reluctant” speaker of Russian, have emerged as contemporary literary concerns. Analyses of recent fiction, nonfiction, and poetry demonstrate how writers have used the Russian language to instantiate semiotic breakdown and ontological reordering as a reflection of the contemporary Belarusian experience. Writers whose works are considered include Yulia Artyomova, Volha Kastsiuk, Tony Lashden, Maria Malinovskaya, Mila Vedrova, and Tatsiana Zamirouskaya. The conclusion turns to Akram Aylisli’s Stone Dreams to consider Russophone mediation as a source of hope and caution amid international conflict and how Russian-language writing continues to reflect and reshape post-Soviet realities.