A scholarly journal from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm.
Issue 2026, 1: Download.
Graduated with a BA in Russian and English Literature from Leeds University. His co-translations of Andrey Platonov have won prizes both in the UK and in the US. His translation of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway won the AATSEEL prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize. Recently he translated The Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman, to be published in July 2013.
We believed that a conference on arts and aesthetics is hardly imaginable without a cultural program and therefore included one, comprising a dance performance, Breakin’ Revolution, on the opening night at Färgfabriken on October 19, and a public screening of the art film To The New Horizons at the closing session at Moderna Museet on October 21, conceptually marking the beginning and the end of the Russian Revolution.
Among the twelve candidates who ran for the presidency in Kyrgystan, three were particularly important: Temir Sariev, Sooronbai Jeenbekov, and Omurbek Babanov. The turn-out was almost 56 percent of 3 million eligible voters. The elections went peacefully in most regions of Kyrgyzstan except Osh city, where half of the inhabitants belong to Uzbek ethnic groups.
The main takeaway from the outcome of Bulgaria’s parliamentary elections in March 2017 is that stability has replaced relative instability. Nevertheless, the last elections have ushered in the possibility of democratic backsliding and increasing authoritarian rule in Bulgaria. In this sense Bulgaria fits within a regional trend. It should also be underlined that the far right managed to do what the ever-quarrelling urban middle class and mainly conservative milieu could not: namely unite and secure enough of a vote to become Borisov's junior partner in government.
In his contribution to the volume Russian Literature since 1991 entitled “The Postmodernist Novel”, Mark Lipovetsky makes the now rather widespread claim that the Russian postmodernist post-Soviet novel represents a break with the totalizing tendencies of the socialist realist novel and opens for new ways of experiencing and conceptualizing the world. In this paper this claim is critically examined on the basis of a reading of Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev i Pustota (transl. as Buddha’s Little Finger or Clay Machine Gun against the backdrop of contemporary debates about realism and simulacra. Here it is argued that the Soviet myth of Chapaev lends itself to the totality of the private myth.
Låt oss dö som hjältar: kvinnliga soldater i revolutionens Ryssland [Let us die as heroes: Female soldiers in the Russia of the Revolution and the Civil War] Per Enerud, Carlsson Bokförlag 2014, 275 pages.
The article provides a closer reading of Walter Benjamin’s essays Experience and Poverty and Moscow, by juxtaposing the records of his visit to Russia in 1926–1927 with the author’s reflections on the nature of the transformations in the urban space of an early Soviet city. By using the dystopian image of Mickey Mouse as the desired inhabitant of modernity introduced by Benjamin in Experience and Poverty, Seits gives the allegorical and comparative interpretation to the substantial changes in the living space of Moscow that were witnessed by Walter Benjamin.
Viorela Ducu and Áron Telegdi-Csetri, Managing “Difference” in Eastern-European Transnational Families. Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2016, 190 pages.
A Day of the World (Den’ mira) was a documentary volume, published in 1937, that was intended to provide a snapshot of the entire globe on a single day, September 27, 1935. The tensions within and around A Day of the World capture some of the basic contradictions in socialist realism, the official aesthetic method of Soviet art: between publicity and intimacy and between the dream of synchronous, global revolution and the aberrant temporalities of individual experience.
Geir Hønneland, Russia and the Arctic. Environment, Identity and Security political challenges. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016, 205 pages; Tormod Heier og Anders Kjølberg (red.). Norge og Russland. Sikkerhets-politiske utfordringer i nordom-rådene. [Norway and Russia. Security Polices in the Northern Areas], Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2015, 208 pages.
In the present article, the main principles of the reforms in Revolutionary Russia in the sphere of art are analyzed through the example of the reorganization of the Higher Artistic School of the Imperial Academy of Arts of St. Petersburg into the Free Art Studios (Svomas). The studios were to become a tool for the transformation of the surrounding reality and for the development of the artistic consciousness of the people. The intended result of those transformations was the complete spiritual and material harmonization of society, while the perfection of artistic interpretation was to be replaced with the perfection of social living. The research presented here is based on the archival materials and is one of the very first publications on the problems associated with the reform of artistic education in the first post-revolutionary years.