The Slavic Literature Pod

Show Notes:

This week, Nina Kossman joins the podcast to talk about her upcoming book, No One Talks About the War: Travels in Ukraine During the War. A collection of short stories recollecting conversations she had while crossing Ukraine in 2023, No One Talks About the War seeks to simply document people. An attempt to avoid generalizing one person's view as everyone's perspective, her book catalogues everyday thoughts, opinions, gripes, and hopes from across the country.

Pre-order No One Talks About the War here (https://www.amazon.com/No-One-Talks-About-War-ebook/dp/B0H89TP8P6).

Nina Kossman is an award-winning bilingual writer, poet and translator. She’s written twelve books, including an anthology she put together for Oxford University Press, a book of vignettes about her childhood in the Soviet Union, several poetry collections and translations of Marina Tsvetaeva. 

This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | Discord⁠ | Patreon

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, threats? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron dives into the various forces in Ukrainian literature, theory, and criticism shortly after the turn of the 20th century. To help him wrap his head around the topic. Drs. Halyna Babak and Yuliya Ilchuk join the podcast to talk about their new readers Ukrainian Literary Modernism of the 1910s to Mid-1930s, Vol. 1 &2.

Buy either volume of Ukrainian Literary Modernism here (https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9798897831197/).

Yuliya Ilchuk is an Associate Professor and the Director of Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Stanford University. Her first awards-winning book, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity ( published by the University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid. Her most recent book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine shifts the discussion from collective remembrance to the cultural dimensions of forgetting. Ilchuk has also published several translations of Ukrainian poetry and literary criticism in tandem with Amelia Glaser and by herself.  

Halyna Babak is an assistant professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Her research explores the intellectual history, literary theory, and literary production of 20th-century Ukraine within the broader context of Soviet and East European political and cultural history. She is the author of the monograph (in co-authorship with Alexander Dmitriev) Atlantida sovetskogo nacmodernizma. Formal'nyj metod v Ukraine (1920-e – načalo 1930-ch). (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021).

This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | Discord⁠ | Patreon

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, threats? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, Jake Zawlacki joins Cameron to talk about his translation of Akhmet Baitursynov's Mosquito. Although it's appearing in English now for the first time, the collection itself is more than a century old--originally published in 1911, Mosquito is a clarion call to the Kazakh people. Living in land still subject to the Russian empire, Baitursynov's collection is a political tract, an appeal for unity, a sorrowful reflection on their world and a hopeful verse for the Kazakh future.

Buy a copy of Mosquito from Academic Studies Press here (https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9798897831616/) or get it wherever you buy your books.

Jake Zawlacki is a writer, translator, and scholar, and currently teaches writing at the University of San Diego. He is the editor of Conversations with Todd McFarlane and Conversations with Denys Cowan as well as the translator of the first English-language translation of Akhmet Baitursynov’s Mosquito. Zawlacki holds degrees from Louisiana State University, University of San Diego, and Stanford University, and his creative work has been published in The Saturday Evening Post, The Journal, Citron Review, and Roanoke Review.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron (finally) dives into Lydia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna. A novel about the Great Terror written during the Great Terror, Chukovskaya's eponymous character lives a fairly comfortable Soviet life -- until her son is arrested for an unspecified crime.

Splitting its time between prison lines and a workplace growing rife with denunciations and arrests, Sofia Petrovna memorializes a moment most people would rather forget. It turns a mirror on the people who lived through the Great Terror and asks, too, "Who were you?"

Some works referenced in this episode:

Stalin, Vol. II, Waiting for Hitler, 1928-1941 by Stephen Kotkin

"Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?" by Matt Lenoe: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/343411

On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Fear and Belief in the USSR's 'Great Terror': Response to Arrest, 1935-1939 by Robert W. Thurston: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2499175

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, on For Your Consideration, Cameron dives into John Williams' 1960 novel, Butcher's Crossing, a cautionary tale about how reading Ralph Waldo Emerson can drive you into buffalo-murdering madness.

It's not uncommon to see the novel compared to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, but after reading both...he's skeptical. It seems that they don't share much more than a genre.

This episode has a two-fold purpose: 1) To cover Butcher's Crossing's adept take on the Western and 2) Why we should all be more skeptical about the act of comparing things, especially these two novels.

Butcher's Crossing: The Husks and Shells of Exploitation by Jack Brenner: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43017669

Pragmatist Individuals and the Nineteenth-Century American West in Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose and John Williams's Butcher's Crossing by Gregory Alan Phipps: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27117925

The Influence of Jacob Boehme's Aurora on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian by Lydia R. Cooper: https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2025.2608966

Aurora the Day Spring Or Dawning of the Day in the East Or Morning-Redness in the Rising of the SUN by Jacob Boehme: https://jacobboehmeonline.com/assets/docs/AURORA.18693240.pdf

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron dives into Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” a dramatization of one chapter of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate: the final letter Anna Semionova writes her son, Viktor Shtrum, from a Jewish ghetto.

We’ll get into how Wiseman adapts this troubling, poignant chapter into film, why I think this chapter is the best encapsulation of Grossman’s ideas in Life and Fate, and some thoughts on why he remains so provocative today. 

Quick note: At one point in this episode I misspeak and say that the Vlasovite Russian Liberation Army was entirely Russian, which was not the case. It was primarily made of of Russian former Red Army soldiers, but did include Soviet defectors of other ethnicities more broadly.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, you and Cameron get into some PREP WORK for an upcoming episode about Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” which dramatizes a chapter of Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. 

In preparation for that episode, we’ll read that dramatized chapter — Part 1, Chapter 18, Anna Semyonova’s final letter to her son, Viktor Shtrum — along with two other letters Grossman wrote to his mother after her death. 

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, Dr. José Vergara returns to the podcast to talk about Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools. The novel, first published in English in 1977, follows student so-and-so (and his double) as he attempts to tell events of his life. The novel doesn’t follow a linear plot — or even an easy-to-distinguish narrator — and puts you on your toes as you meander between stories.

Dr. Vergara is an associate professor of Russian in the Bryn Mawr College’s Department of Russian. He is the author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature, a co-editor of Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, and aa co-editor of the digital annotated edition of Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf.

Link to Encyclopedia of the Dog: https://encyclopediaofthedog.com/

The Embodied Language of Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools by José Vergara: https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.97.3.0426

Sasha Sokolov: ‘Here Comes Everybody’ Meets ‘Those Who Came’ by José Vergara: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv1fkgbqh.9

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron takes on the back half of Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, covering chapters 25-43. As our characters finally arrive in the town of Chevengur, we go from a picaresque romp around the newly-Soviet countryside into the dirty work of actually building Communism. 

“Danger and Deliverance: Reading Andrei Platonov” by Angela Livingstone

“Chevengur: On the Road with Bolshevik Utopia” by David Bethea in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction

“Chevengur: Buried in the Family Plot” by Elior Borenstein in Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron returns to the beginning of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Ukrainian Trilogy with “Zvenihora.” The film, released in 1928, explores a thousand years of Ukrainian history — spanning from Varangian invasion to the rise of the Soviet Union. The film is a fascinating take on Soviet film, mashing together Ukrainian culture and the new, Soviet reality.

You may have noticed this episode is two hours long….so, I decided to look into why I was finding inconsistent information on Dovzhenko’s life in the episode on “Earth.” Turns out, there’s a good reason for that. Oh, boy, do we get into that in this episode.

Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1939 autobiography

My notes on George Liber’s Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 

Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected].