This book belongs to a new academic genre that has become quite popular over the past few years: interdisciplinary volumes written by a collective of authors exploring Russian culture in a global framework. Other recent examples of this genre include Global Russian Cultures, edited by Kevin M. F. Platt (U of Wisconsin Press, 2019), Russian Culture in the Era of Globalization, edited by Sarah Hudspith and Vlad Strukov (Routledge, 2020) and Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020, edited by Maria Rubins (UCL Press, 2021). Given the conceptual closeness of such terms as “globalization,” “transnationalism” and “diaspora,” it is not particularly surprising that these books have been produced by an overlapping cast of scholars. Seven of the twenty authors contributing to Transnational Russian Studies also contributed to one or more of the other volumes.
In their introduction to the book the editors embrace a stance of methodological self-reflection by placing special emphasis on the word “studies.” Their proclaimed goal is to interrogate “how the distinctive history of nation-making, empire-building, and diasporization that has shaped our field's object of study also shapes how Russian studies is ‘done’” (3). “Russia” and “Russian culture” are treated as “epistemic frames,” creating a need to navigate between “the Scylla of essentialism and the Charybdis of globalism” (6–7). Furthermore, the editors stress the necessity “to view the transnational from a Russian vantage point” by offering and interpreting “views ‘from within’” (19), invoking Pavel Florenskii's notion of “reverse perspective” and Mikhail Bakhtin's “outsidedness” (20–21). In spite of the stated aim of incorporating Russian perspectives, only one contributor, Vitaly Nuriev, the co-author of a chapter on translation in the multilingual USSR, is based in the Russian Federation. The other contributors teach at institutions in the UK and US, and, in one case, at the University of Amsterdam. It seems, then, that the reflection on the transnational status of Russian culture is mainly a concern of Anglophone academics (although some of them are Russian-born or of Slavic descent). This is also true for the other volumes mentioned earlier.
The book's chapters are arranged in four overarching categories. Part One, “Nation, Empire, and Beyond,” deals with the multi-ethnic space of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union as a geopolitical frame for national, imperial, and postcolonial entanglements. Part Two, “Beyond and Between Languages,” addresses such topics as translation, world literature, and Russian-language drama beyond the confines of Russia. Part Three, “Cultures Crossing Borders,” explores the transnational resonance of Russian opera, film, and fiction as well as representations of queerness and the “aesthetics of imperfection” in Russian online dating sites. The fourth and final section, “Russia Going Global,” concerns itself with the Russian internet and state media in the age of Putin. It also contains an ethnographic chapter by Lara Ryazanova-Clarke featuring a sociolinguistic analysis of three quite different members of the Russian diaspora in London.
As becomes clear from this list, the individual contributions are quite varied and cover a wide range of topics and approaches. Some chapters, such as Vera Tolz's opening survey of Russian colonial discourses vis-à-vis the west, offer useful reading especially to non-specialists. Other contributions provide more specific case studies. For example, Stephen M. Norris discusses the curious fact that Fedor Bondarchuk's Stalingrad (2013), the highest-grossing film in Russian cinematic history, became an unexpected blockbuster in China, and Jeanne-Marie Jackson analyzes the reception of Fedor Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi among South African novelists. Strangely enough, she does not mention J. M. Coetzee, who, on the other hand, does make an appearance in Marijeta Bozovic's chapter on Vladimir Nabokov and World Literature. Two of the editors contribute chapters of their own. Connor Doak's informative essay about queer transnational encounters shows how gender and sexuality map unto questions of nation and civilization. Stephen Hutchings provides an illuminating analysis of the international broadcaster RT. He argues that, far from being a linear instrument of state propaganda, RT's “double-voicedness” can be connected with the (self)-satirical discourse known as stiob. To their credit, and unlike most other contributors, both Doak and Hutchings explicitly link their discussion to issues raised in other chapters of the volume.
In the meantime, Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, which is still ongoing at the time of this writing, has fundamentally transformed Russia's transnational entanglements with its neighbors and the rest of the world. It also forces one to read some of these essays with new eyes. The Russian-Ukrainian relations addressed in Amelia Glaser's essay about Nikolai Gogol΄ as a writer from a transnational “contact zone” will never be the same again, and it is doubtful whether the cultural bonds between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus through their common use of the Russian language, as argued in Julie Curtis’ essay on “The Politics of Theatre,” will remain intact. Other observations in the book show that the Russian imperialist rhetoric justifying military aggression as a settling of old grievances has not changed since the nineteenth century. Olga Maiorova, in a chapter dealing with the Russian colonization of Central Asia, mentions that the forceful annexation of non-Russian territories was presented “as a ‘return’ of ‘our own’ native lands, which had been taken from helpless Russia in the remote past when it was suffering from multiple invasions” (70). Tatiana Filimonova's discussion of Vladimir Sorokin's dystopian novels provides glimpses of a future dominated by the paranoid Eurasianist fantasies of Aleksandr Dugin. Already back in 2007, Sorokin “expressed his concern about the darkest pages of Russian history entering contemporary reality” (97). Whether Sorokin's prophecy in the novel Telluria (2013) that the forceful revival of the empire will lead to “tumultuous changes, political instability, and its eventual disintegration” (103) remains to be seen. In any event, with the Russian Federation having become an international pariah and the worldwide Russian diaspora turning into an exilic community, there will be a continued need to reassess Russia's position in the contemporary world.
