Suche

The influx of international students into the USSR was one of the most domestically visible features of Cold War Soviet foreign policy. The “friendship of nations” ideology brought students from various Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America to study in Russia. These men and women lived in dormitories, attended classes and took part in official meetings, extracurricular activities, friendships, feuds, and love affairs. Obschiaga life put them in intimate contact with Russian students and with each other. Although these encounters often failed to inculcate a faith in “the friendship of nations” or cement an image of Soviet superiority, they did succeed in fostering international solidarities and individual friendships, including some unexpected ones.

This one-day exploratory workshop brings together literary scholars, historians, and anthropologists working on Soviet and post-Soviet spaces and cultural formations. We ask whether the Soviet student dormitory can fruitfully be considered as a microcosm for the USSR’s tiered cultural policy toward its various “Easts”: the “domestic abroad,” Eastern Europe, and the Afro-Asian world. Each participant will offer a mini-presentation (10 to 15 minutes) on a single literary or archival example. Novels by Ismail Kadare, Juri Andruchowytsch, and Sonallah Ibrahim and theoretical works by Svetlana Boym and Yuri Slezkine will guide our conversation: if the Soviet Union can be metaphorized as “a communal apartment” (Slezkine 1994), could it be productive to imagine Soviet inter/national policy as a student dormitory? How detailed could this model get? Would it be useful to think metaphorically about different floors, communal areas, the dezhurnaya, etc.?

Background readings will be circulated in advance. You can find information on the speakers here.

Program:

9:30-10:00 Welcome Coffee

10:00-10:15 Welcome
Georges Khalil, Forum Transregionale Studien
Andrii Portnov, Prisma Ukraïna

Each workshop session will comprise three mini-presentations of 10-15 min and 1 hour of discussion

10:15-12:00 Session 1: Spatial and Emotional Structures of the Obschezhitie

Margaret Litvin – Ismail Kadare at Gorky Institute and Sonallah Ibrahim at VGIK
Tsypylma Darieva – The Spatial Order of Soviet Dormitories
Svetlana Boltovskaja – St. Petersburg African Students on Dormitory Life

12:00-13:00 Lunch

13:00-14:45 Session 2: The Communist University of Toilers of the East

Masha Kirasirova – Concentric Circles of “East” at KUTV
Elizabeth Bishop – The Arab Section at KUTV
Thomas Lahusen – On Elizabeth McGuire on Chinese Students at KUTV

Coffee Break

15:15-17:00 Session 3: Dormitories in Late Soviet Literature and Film

Schamma Schahadat – Dorms in Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears
Gesine Drews-Sylla – Dorms in Little Vera and Abderrahmane Sissako
Susanne Frank – On Juri Andrukhovich’s Moskoviada (2000) and Kadare’s Twilight of the Eastern Gods (1978)