Kevin M. F. Platt

Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when "Russian" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic "home" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and cultural life of Russians who in successive waves of migration have dispersed to the United States, Europe, and Israel, or who remained after the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian states. The volume's internationally renowned contributors treat the many different global Russian cultures not as "displaced" elements of Russian cultural life but rather as independent entities in their own right. They describe diverse forms of literature, music, film, and everyday life that transcend and defy political, geographic, and even linguistic borders. Arguing that Russian cultures today are many, this volume contends that no state or society can lay claim to be the single or authentic representative of Russianness. In so doing, it contests the conceptions of culture and identity at the root of nation-building projects in and around Russia.

Global Russian Cultures

Anna Andreevna Akhmatova

James E. Falen

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Whale and Star Press Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was a skilled love poet who, through no choice of her own, became a witness to mass violence, a widely recognized exemplar of endurance and moral strength, and finally a symbol of Russian national resilience. At the start of her career, during the final years of the Russian Empire, Akhmatova was a cultural celebrity who fascinated a generation not only with her poetry but also with the drama that she created around herself. After the revolution of 1917, she was attacked as a decadent bourgeois author and driven into silence and obscurity. Living in relative poverty, with her family and friends repeatedly arrested and harassed, and she herself publicly cursed by the representatives of the state, Akhmatova survived the darkest decades of Soviet history. Near the end of her life, when timorous cultural bureaucrats allowed her to reemerge as a public figure, she revealed to readers that even if the “collective” had rejected her as an unworthy member she had continued to write poetry reflecting the trials and calamities of Soviet men and women with greater truth and moral authority than any official poet could attain.

Kevin M. F. Platt

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