Pushkin House and Dr Natasha Rulyova are launching a series of conversations with authors of Russophone literature. The first in the series is an event with the award-winning Tatar author Guzel Yakhina. Her three novels — Zuleikha, My Children and A Train to Samarkand — have been highly acclaimed and translated into dozens of languages.
The conversation will be in Russian with English translation by Dr Isobel Palmer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, the University of Birmingham.
Russophonia, as defined by Naomi Beth Caffee, is “the widespread and variegated uses of the Russian language outside of the customary boundaries of ethnicity and nation” (2013). Russophone literature can be found within and without Russia. It is the literature written by authors who are more than Russian-language speakers, who have hybrid identities and multicultural experiences because they have lived and worked in diverse cultures, whether these are inside or outside Russia. The works by such authors have often been marginalised. For example, in the former USSR there was Russian literature and literature by ethnic minority authors, and the latter was inevitably seen as peripheral in relation to the hegemonic Russian national literature. The aim of our series is to disrupt this hierarchy by bringing Russophone literature into the limelight and by prioritising works by authors with diverse and complex cultural backgrounds. By doing this, we also seek to contribute to de-centring the existing canons and decolonising Russian literature.
Yakhina’s works are populated with characters with hybrid identities and from diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, age, religious and educational backgrounds, abled and disabled, the colonisers and the colonised. Many of her characters are multilingual and translingual. They switch linguistic codes, they subvert canons and question norms. Their use of language is creative and destabilising. They exist in liminal spaces, they cross borders and boundaries, including cultural and geographic. They use different forms of travel (train to Samarkand, boat to the destination of Siberian exile, travel by foot in the Volga area). They inhabit a great variety of communities (ethnic, Soviet, military, criminal, gulag). They often find themselves happier in the countryside, away from the cities, which appear as the places full of danger and occupied by power structures. They find shelter in nature, whether it is in the forest or on a river bank.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Guzel Yakhina is a Russian author and screenwriter of Tatar origins. Her novels include Zuleikha, My Children and A Train to Samarkand. She is a winner of the Big Book literary prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award.
Dr Natalia (Natasha) Rulyova is Associate Professor in Russian at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests spread across the areas of Russian literature, translation studies, post-Soviet media culture and genre studies.