Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian IdentityThe Black Holes of History: Narratives of Cultural Trauma

Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian Identity: The Black Holes of History:... [Chapter 2 analyzes prose by Mikhail Kuraev, Viktor Erofeev, Tat’iana Tolstaia, and Viktor Pelevin—all writers who have considered Russia’s “irregular” historical trajectory of revolutions, social upheaval, and political violence. The focus is on Pelevin’s novel Buddha’s Little Finger (1996), which structures Russian history along the lines of the flashbacks and memory gaps of a traumatized mind. However, the novel also employs the hero’s specific twentieth-century traumas and their disorienting effects to dissolve (nationalist) notions of cultural origin and to undermine any idea of a plot of or in (Russian) history. Building on Dominick LaCapra’s work, I suggest in this chapter that Buddha’s Little Finger is characteristic of postmodernist Russian prose, which regularly envelops historical losses in an insistence on structural absences.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Post-Soviet Literature and the Search for a Russian IdentityThe Black Holes of History: Narratives of Cultural Trauma

Download PDF
29 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/post-soviet-literature-and-the-search-for-a-russian-identity-the-black-smUmvqssFZ

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
ISBN
978-1-137-59672-7
Pages
29 –58
DOI
10.1057/978-1-137-59363-4_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Chapter 2 analyzes prose by Mikhail Kuraev, Viktor Erofeev, Tat’iana Tolstaia, and Viktor Pelevin—all writers who have considered Russia’s “irregular” historical trajectory of revolutions, social upheaval, and political violence. The focus is on Pelevin’s novel Buddha’s Little Finger (1996), which structures Russian history along the lines of the flashbacks and memory gaps of a traumatized mind. However, the novel also employs the hero’s specific twentieth-century traumas and their disorienting effects to dissolve (nationalist) notions of cultural origin and to undermine any idea of a plot of or in (Russian) history. Building on Dominick LaCapra’s work, I suggest in this chapter that Buddha’s Little Finger is characteristic of postmodernist Russian prose, which regularly envelops historical losses in an insistence on structural absences.]

Published: Jun 10, 2016

Keywords: Black Hole; Russian Society; Soviet Period; Cultural Memory; Social Upheaval

There are no references for this article.