{"id":10686,"date":"2025-10-26T06:51:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T06:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/?p=10686&lang=en"},"modified":"2025-10-26T07:11:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T07:11:26","slug":"guest-lecture-multilingualism-and-the-poetics-of-memory-in-recent-russophone-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/?p=10678","title":{"rendered":"Guest lecture \u2013 Multilingualism and the Poetics of Memory in Recent Russophone Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Miriam Finkelstein<\/strong>
\n(University of Konstanz, Germany)<\/p>\n

5 November 2025 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET<\/strong>
\nInstitute of World Literature SAS + online<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join Zoom Meeting:
\n<\/strong>https:\/\/us06web.zoom.us\/j\/89141147144?pwd=y9zkxUSfZAB6sibbyseaIVaM2IGTZa.1<\/a>
\nMeeting ID: 891 4114 7144
\nPasscode: 325948<\/p>\n

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 \u2018authentic\u2019 and \u2018unadulterated\u2019 by any kind of external authority, particularly male. The introduction of mothers\u2019 languages provides for a multilingual dimension in the texts: in Averbukh’s Svidetel\u2019stvo chetvertogo litsa <\/em>(2017), the mother\u2019s Russian is consistently interspersed with Yiddish and German words and expressions. In Skarynkina’s Yes\u041c\u0430\u043c\u043e\u0447\u043a\u0430<\/em> (2022), the Russian of the lyrical self alternates with the mother\u2019s Belarusian while Ekaterina Sokolova\u2019s Chudskoe pechen\u2019ie<\/em> (2015) indicates local pronunciations to emphasize the origins of her mother figures in the Russian North.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

The lecture is organized within the framework of the IMPULZ grant\u00a0Translation and cross-lingual stylistic transfer: Towards a theory of language contact in literature and <\/em>in collaboration with the East Centre at the University of East Anglia.<\/p>\n

Miriam Finkelstein<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Miriam Finkelstein (University of Konstanz, Germany) 5 November 2025 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET Institute of World Literature SAS + online     Join Zoom Meeting: https:\/\/us06web.zoom.us\/j\/89141147144?pwd=y9zkxUSfZAB6sibbyseaIVaM2IGTZa.1 Meeting ID: 891 4114 7144 Passcode: 325948 A remarkable tendency in recent multilingual Russophone poetry is the ascription of a prominent role to mothers and their languages: Aleksandr Averbukh … Pokra\u010dova\u0165 na Guest lecture \u2013 Multilingualism and the Poetics of Memory in Recent Russophone Poetry<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pozvanky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10686"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10696,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10686\/revisions\/10696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usvl.sav.sk\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}