"Homeland! Why are you so infinitely Unstoppable?”: The Search for a Domestic Space Between the Undecipherable West and the Incomprehensible East

  • Barbara Ronchetti University od Rome "La Sapienza"
Keywords: Contemporary Russian Literature, Post-Soviet Literary geography, Memory and Literature, Personal Identity and National Identity, European Literature

Abstract

The starting point and essential inspiration of this essay is the diffuse displacement of contemporary man confronting the changing cultural and territorial boundaries in the post-Soviet era. By the mid-1990s, the rapid changes Russia was undergoing in joining the web of Western cultures and new modes of communication were finding full expression in the literary field. The Russian search for a renewed geographical identity is explored through the pages of contemporary writers (Erofeev, Pelevin, Shishkin, Sharapova, and Stogov).

In the works under consideration in this paper, the immensity of endless spaces, which for centuries have characterized the Russian territorial specificity, straddling two continents, have changed value owing to the disappearance of specific cultural and spiritual frontiers.

Faced with a complex and unreadable present, modern Russian literary characters are looking for answers with which to reconstruct real and imaginary geographical spaces, while reconnecting the past to the future. Recalling memories of their recent history, they move towards a new understanding of a limited portion of the world. The complex dialogue between the inner world and territorial reality becomes a key via which to comprehend some of the most relevant cultural phenomena in post-Soviet Russia (and Europe).

 

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Author Biography

Barbara Ronchetti, University od Rome "La Sapienza"

Barbara Ronchetti, an Italian scholar of Russian literature and translation studies, is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. She published the first Italian monograph on the "Znanie" group’s editorial activity in 1996 as well as several essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian poetry and prose. In the last few years, she has worked on the definition of the conceptual meaning of the "poetic image", and published numerous textual analyses of concrete poetic images (the City 2004, the Venus of Milo 2004, the Duel 2005 and 2006, the Train 2007 and 2008, the Flight 2011). Her main research interests focus on autobiography and contemporary fiction; “reading units” as critical patterns for interpreting original and translated prose and poetry; and literature and photography: a mutual exchange.

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Published
2011-11-26
How to Cite
Ronchetti, B. (2011). "Homeland! Why are you so infinitely Unstoppable?”: The Search for a Domestic Space Between the Undecipherable West and the Incomprehensible East. Between, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/304