Miriam Finkelstein
(University of Konstanz, Germany)

5 November 2025 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

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A remarkable tendency in recent multilingual Russophone poetry is the ascription of a prominent role to mothers and their languages: Aleksandr Averbukh (Ukraine/Israel/USA), Tanya Skarynkina (Belarus), and Ekaterina Sokolova (Russia), among others, frequently reproduce the oral speech of mothers that is imagined as ‘authentic’ and ‘unadulterated’ by any kind of external authority, particularly male. The introduction of mothers’ languages provides for a multilingual dimension in the texts: in Averbukh’s Svidetel’stvo chetvertogo litsa (2017), the mother’s Russian is consistently interspersed with Yiddish and German words and expressions. In Skarynkina’s YesМамочка (2022), the Russian of the lyrical self alternates with the mother’s Belarusian while Ekaterina Sokolova’s Chudskoe pechen’ie (2015) indicates local pronunciations to emphasize the origins of her mother figures in the Russian North.

In my talk, I will argue that here and elsewhere in Russophone poetry, devices of multilingualism serve to mark specific non-Russian national or regional contexts and, as in the case of Averbukh and Skarynkina, to distance the authors and their texts from Russia and Russian literature. Moreover, multilingualism functions as a mnemonic strategy: mother’s languages serve as an archive in which the memories of the twentieth century are stored, memories of dramatic and tragic histories of Russian-Soviet borderlands, of colonial violence, war, genocide, and displacement. On the other hand, however, mothers’ multilingual languages also function as a powerful source of poetic creativity and productivity for their descendants. Ultimately, insofar as multilingual literature questions and undermines nationally conceived linguistic unity and normativity, I suggest thinking of multilingualism as an innovative and efficient means of resistance to national-chauvinistic, illiberal and anti-democratic political tendencies.

The lecture is organized within the framework of the IMPULZ grant Translation and cross-lingual stylistic transfer: Towards a theory of language contact in literature and in collaboration with the East Centre at the University of East Anglia.

Miriam Finkelstein is Professor of Slavic Literatures and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her main research areas include global Russophone literatures with a special interest in poetry, translingual and multilingual literatures in and from Eastern Europe, Russian-Jewish literature. Currently, she is completing her second book about memory and history narratives in recent Russian-American and Russian-German fiction.

Boris Lanin
(Univerzita Adama Mickiewicza, Poznaň)

29 October 2025 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

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This presentation explores the concept of avatars and technological artifacts in the dystopian fiction of Vladimir Sorokin, focusing on Day of the Oprichnik and Telluria. Sorokin’s use of avatars, electronic devices, and symbolic objects highlights the interplay between technology, memory, and identity. The talk will draw parallels with earlier Russian dystopias like Zamyatin’s We, linking S-4711 to later digital avatars. Devices such as the “umnitsa” and tellurium nails serve both narrative and metaphysical functions, symbolizing control, ritual, and simulation. Holograms and robots are examined as tools of state power and as postmodern simulacra. Through grotesque, hyperbole, and parody, Sorokin critiques authoritarianism and the commodification of consciousness. His work ultimately reveals a world where technological advancement is entangled with myth, ritual, and the erosion of individual agency.

The talk will try to read Alexey Konakov’s novel Tabiya Thirty-Two through the lens of Johan Huizinga’s concept of homo ludens and the genre conventions of dystopian literature. Set in post-crisis Russia in the year 2080, the novel imagines a society rebuilt around chess as the cornerstone of cultural identity, a tool of state ideology, and a means of social control. The author explores how the image of the “playing human” — homo ludens — is transformed under a chess-centric dictatorship. Chess is reinterpreted not as a sport, but as a humanities-based discipline where academic and cultural contributions are valued above competitive success. The talk will draw on a wide theoretical framework, including Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, Continue reading Guest lecture – Orwell’s legacy and strange new Russian dystopias →

Rainier Grutman
(University of Ottawa, Canada)

15 October 2025 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

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This talk completes and complicates traditional mimetic (‘realist’) readings or multilingual fiction by highlighting the aesthetic effects of heterolingualism and the structuring role of languages in terms of plot. Using Yann Martel’s Self (1996) as case study, it shows how overt use of French, Spanish, Czech, and Hungarian forces readers of this English-Canadian novel to confront its multilingual poetics. Czech and Hungarian are perhaps especially relevant in Bratislava: the former partner language of Slovak appears only briefly, but Hungarian occupies entire pages of dialogue. These linguistic fragments are left untranslated, furthermore, thus pushing readers beyond their linguistic comfort zones. Ultimately, they connect to the narrator’s two central love interests (a girl from Prague and a member of Slovakia’s historic Magyar minority), with Hungarian discreetly preparing the explosive and tragic finale of a novel that is as much about words as it is about the world.

A Full Professor at the University of Ottawa (Canada), Rainier Grutman studied Romance philology, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Namur, Leuven and Madrid universities before earning his Ph.D. in French Studies in Montreal. He has held appointments as visiting faculty in Belgium (Ghent, Leuven), Italy (Bologna) and the United Kingdom (Aston University). In 2022, he was elected to the Academia Europaea. Rainier Grutman started studying bilingual writers and multilingual texts long before they became fashionable research topics, most notably in his book, Des langues qui résonnent (Montreal, 1997; 2^nd ed. Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2019.) His latest contributions to this conversation appeared in the inaugural issue of Brill’s Journal of Literary Multilingualism (May 2023), the Forum for Modern Language Studies (Oxford UP, Jan. 2024), and the edited volume, Plurilinguisme et production littéraire transnationale en français depuis le Moyen Age (Geneva: Droz, 2023).

The lecture is held within the framework of the IMPULZ grant Translation and cross-lingual stylistic transfer: Towards a theory of language contact in literature.

4 June (Wednesday) 2025 at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in English

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In this journal issue, edited by Oksana Blashkiv, an international group of scholars searches for answers regarding the contemporary condition of the university and its representations in Anglophone and non-Anglophone campus fiction in its plurality and diversity. By bringing attention to campus fiction in Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, Czech, German, Bulgarian, and American literature, the issue sheds light on the global campus providing comparative global/transatlantic and national/local perspectives on the university and the ways it is perceived in different cultural contexts. Simultaneously, the authors delineate a series of idiosyncratic characteristics of the campus/academic novel within a specific national literary tradition, while drawing parallels with the best-known case, the Anglo-American genre. Their articles highlight the diversity of campus fiction, thus widening the discussion about the global campus and enriching it with the topics of national/local history and cultural memory, distinctive perspectives on multilingualism and hybrid identities, and above all, the past and present of the university that defines its future.

The event will be moderated by the issue’s editor Oksana Blashkiv.

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.