Ongoing Projects
The ongoing project on Cultural Capitalism looks at the rise of the book market in post-Soviet Russian
in order to understand the development of capitalist aesthetics and the effects of capitalist thinking
on cultural production. The project includes a number of article publications as well as the forthcoming
book Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism
(Cornell University Press, 2025).
For this project, I worked with two undergraduate research assistants, Amelia Benjamin and Nina Armstrong,
to compile a data set of all the books listed in what were the first and longest-running Russian bestseller
lists, the “Bestsellers of Moscow” printed every week in the publishing industry newspaper Knizhnoe obozrenie
(The Book Review). We have analyzed this data in a series of visualizations which appear in the appendix of the book
Cultural Capitalism and in more dynamic form on the project page here.
Red Migrations
Back in 2016, Philip Gleissner and I launched a project on the leftists who moved across borders in the wake of the 1917
Bolshevik Revolution. We called it “Red Émigrés,” and it stirred a lot of interest. We later changed the name to “Red Migrations,”
in order to focus on the movements as much as the personalities involved.
In 2020, in the heart of the pandemic, we hosted a series of workshops on the topic, in which leading scholars shared their
research on leftist transnationalism in the interwar period and beyond. Those workshops became the basis for the volume that
Phil and I edited Red Migrations: Transnational Mobility
and Leftist Culture after 1917 (University of Toronto Press, 2024). You can read the introduction to the volume
here
and my chapter on Langston Hughes, Arthur Koestler, and the poetics of Disgust
here.
After World Literature
One of the chapters in my book on Cultural Capitalism
looks at the post-Soviet novel as world literature. In researching that chapter I came to see the recent resurgence
in the disciplinary paradigm of “World Literature” as a historically embedded phenomenon. Specifically, the paradigm
gained traction around the end of the Cold War, just as triumphalist narratives of the End of History and a new world
order pervaded the political sphere.
This new project After World Literature, which I'm starting to work on now, asks what happens now that illusions of the End of History and
the post-1989 world order have definitively fallen apart. If “World Literature” is how we see comparative literature at
the end of history, then how do we see it after that epoch has ended? I am interested in the literature of ressentiment in
Russian nationalist texts that defiantly avoid translation as well as in the editors, publishers, critics, and readers who
seek out literature as political identification especially amidst Russia's war on Ukraine and Israel's war in Gaza. Finally,
I want to use this project to think through a different vision of global literatures, one that might decenter market-based
circulation in favor of elective affinities of aesthetics, politics, and critiques.
Male Fantasies
I'm also working on another large-scale project now that looks at contemporary Russian culture, culminating in the war in Ukraine,
as a response to a (perceived) crisis in masculinity. The project is tentatively called “Male Fantasies,” an homage to
Klaus Theweleit's great study of the Freikorps after WWI, when another crisis of masculinity lead to disaster. I am interested specifically in how
Putinism has suggested that neoliberal modernity has stunted or perverted natural masculine tendencies and how it offers organized violence,
in the forms of both play and actual warfare, as remedies.
Still from Russian Ministry of Defense recruitment commercial. The text reads: “You're a man. Be one.”
A few years before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I published an article on the astonishing rise of historical reconstruction (including, but not limited to battle re-enactments)
in contemporary Russia. There I noted how a fascination with pre-modernity allowed reconstructors to reject the contemporary world in favor of
a bricolaged world where physical force and received hierarchies still hold sway. Though the movement was originally grassroots,
it was soon supported by the state. I'm now extending this project back to its beginnings in perestroika, when a
number of future reconstructors first started role-playing characters from Tolkien, and up to the war in Ukraine, where several reconstructors
have transfered their passion for playing at violence into real-world destruction.
Books and Edited Journal Issues
Articles
|
2025
|
“The Sociological Turn: Public Opinion Polling and the Dream of an Open Society,”
Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere: Media Culture of the Russian 1990s,
ed. Maya Vinokour (Amherst College Press).
|
|
2024
|
“‘Syphilis, Dirt, and the Frontiers of Revolution’: Revolutionary Geographies
at the Borders of Disgust,” Red Migrations: Transnational Mobility and Leftist
Culture after 1917, eds. Bradley A. Gorski and Philip Gleissner (University of Toronto Press).
|
|
2024
|
“The Market,” The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, eds.
Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich, and Emma Widdis (Cambridge Univeristy Press).
|
|
2023
|
“Литературный капитализм и экономика престижа. Премии в 1990-е и 2000-е гг.”
[“Literary Capitalism and the Economy of Prestige. Post-Soviet Prizes in the 1990s and 2000s”]
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, No. 179 (Jan 2023): 202–218.
|
|
2021
|
“
Socialist Realism Inside-Out: Boris Akunin and Mass Literature for the Elites,”
The Akunin Project: The Mysteries and Histories of Russia’s Bestselling Author,
eds. Stephen Norris and Elena Baraban (University of Toronto Press), 255–81.
|
|
2020
|
“
The Bestseller, or The Cultural Logic of Postsocialism,”
Slavic Review, Vol. 79, No. 3 (Fall): 613–635.
|
|
2020
|
“Шаров и правда; или, путь Гоголя,” Владимир Шаров: По ту сторону истории,
под ред. Анастасии де ля Фортель и Марка Липовецкого (Новое литературное обозрение),
501–532. [“Sharov and Truth; or, Gogol’s Way,” Vladimir Sharov: Beyond History,
eds. Anastasia de la Fortelle and Mark Lipovetsky, (New Literary Observer),
501–532.]
|
|
2019
|
“
The Battle for (Pre-)Modernity: Medieval Festivals in Contemporary Russia,”
The Russian Review, Vol. 78, No. 4 (October): 547–68.
-
Reprint: “The Battle for (Pre-)Modernity: Medieval Festivals
in Contemporary Russia,” Convention 2019: Modernization and Multiple
Modernities (Yekaterinburg: KnE, Ural Institute of the Humanities, 2020), 303–318.
|
|
2018
|
“
Enchanted Geographies: Aleksei Ivanov and the Aesthetic Management of Ural Identity,”
in Russia’s Regional Identities, eds. Edith W. Clowes, Gisela
Erbslöh, Ani Kokobobo (Routledge), 160–85.
|
|
2018
|
“
Manufacturing Dissent: Vassily Aksyonov, Stiliagi, and the Dilemma of Self-Interpretation,"
Russian Literature, Special issue on "Cultures of (Non-)Conformity: From Late Soviet Times to the Present," Vol. 96–98,
(May): 77–104.
|
Other Projects
I'm currently a core researcher on a project creating a digital
archive of the post-Soviet 1990s led by Maya Vinokour (NYU) and recently granted a $250,000 grant from the NEH.
I edit the series Crosscurrents:
Russian Literature in Context for Rowman & Littlefield. I'm looking forward to announcing a couple of exciting new titles very soon.
Along with Kathleen Smith,
Juliane Fürst,
and Veronika Pehe, I'm co-organizing a series of conferences on the "Long
Perestroika" (1980–2000) across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Our next conference will take
place at Georgetown in March, 2025.
If any of this piques your interest, get in touch. I'd love to hear from you!