Anatolij V. Kharkhurin
(independent scholar)
24 June 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in English and Russian
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.
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This lecture examines literary creativity through the lens of plurilingual and pluricultural experience. Traditional approaches have treated creativity as a cognitive capacity located within the individual mind. This perspective offers limited explanatory power for multilingual literary practice, where meaning emerges across languages and cultural frames. Building on the Plurilingual Creativity Framework, the lecture conceptualizes creativity as a dynamic process shaped by the interaction of cognitive, affective, and reflective pathways. Language contact in literature is approached as a manifestation of this process. Multilingual writing, code-switching, and translation are interpreted as creative strategies that enable expanded meaning-making and identity construction. The talk also addresses methodological challenges in studying creativity in multilingual contexts and outlines implications for literary analysis. By reframing language contact as a creative resource, the lecture offers a theoretically grounded perspective on how plurilingual experience shapes literary expression.
Anatoliy V. Kharkhurin independent scholar based in Europe; formerly Professor of Psychology at HSE University and Director of the Laboratory for Linguistic, Intercultural, and Creative Competencies. He holds a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the City University of New York, as well as degrees in Linguistics and Cognitive Science from the University of Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focuses on the relationship between multilingualism and creativity, with particular emphasis on plurilingual and pluricultural competence as drivers of creative development. He is the author of the book Multilingualism and Creativity and has published extensively in leading journals on creativity and multilingualism. He is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new monograph on the Plurilingual Creativity Framework, which advances an integrative model of creativity across cognitive, affective, and reflective domains. He developed the Plurilingual Intercultural Creative Keys (PICK) program, an educational framework designed to foster creative, linguistic, and intercultural competences. In addition to his academic work, he is active as a poet, multimedia artist, and curator.