Spring 2022

We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Maya Karin Peterson, who passed away unexpectedly and tragically on June 16, 2021. We, the editors and authors of this special issue, are still shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible loss. We can only seek some small solace in the fact that her highly original and relevant contribution on the Eurasian steppe was ready for publication when her life ended so abruptly. We are grateful to the editors of the Slavic Review, who kindly agreed to publish her paper posthumously.

We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Maya Karin Peterson, who passed away unexpectedly and tragically on June 16, 2021. We, the editors and authors of this special issue, are still shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible loss. We can only seek some small solace in the fact that her highly original and relevant contribution on the Eurasian steppe was ready for publication when her life ended so abruptly. We are grateful to the editors of the Slavic Review, who kindly agreed to publish her paper posthumously.

We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Maya Karin Peterson, who passed away unexpectedly and tragically on June 16, 2021. We, the editors and authors of this special issue, are still shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible loss. We can only seek some small solace in the fact that her highly original and relevant contribution on the Eurasian steppe was ready for publication when her life ended so abruptly. We are grateful to the editors of the Slavic Review, who kindly agreed to publish her paper posthumously.

Turkmenistan holds a special place in the Russian and Soviet imagination. At the turn of the last century, especially, Turkmenistan appeared as an imaginative object shaped by both nineteenth century tropes and images of the steppe and by the modernist’s revaluation and displacement of these very tropes. This article traces this intellectual history from the late nineteenth century to the fall of the Soviet empire and elicits three main narratives through which the republic was rendered alien: Turkmenistan as a “republic from outer space,” as an “arctic desert,” and as a republic whose southern border is constantly threatened by various forces that can never be successfully defeated. Based on a wide body of literary works and films, mainly from the 1920s–30s and the late Soviet period, the paper points to intertextual references that betray both shifts and continuities within these narratives. The analysis shows how notions of political integration and climatic transformations were constantly countered by alternative imaginary boundaries, contributing to an “imaginative geography” of the republic that shaped the way Turkmenistan was perceived. The development of such an “imaginative geography” of Turkmenistan as an “alien republic” was thereby inextricably linked to its steppe and desert geography, marked by a threefold dialectic between concrete and imaginary geography, a rhetoric of appropriation and of alienation, and between present and mythical time.

We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Maya Karin Peterson, who passed away unexpectedly and tragically on June 16, 2021. We, the editors and authors of this special issue, are still shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible loss. We can only seek some small solace in the fact that her highly original and relevant contribution on the Eurasian steppe was ready for publication when her life ended so abruptly. We are grateful to the editors of the Slavic Review, who kindly agreed to publish her paper posthumously.

We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Maya Karin Peterson, who passed away unexpectedly and tragically on June 16, 2021. We, the editors and authors of this special issue, are still shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible loss. We can only seek some small solace in the fact that her highly original and relevant contribution on the Eurasian steppe was ready for publication when her life ended so abruptly. We are grateful to the editors of the Slavic Review, who kindly agreed to publish her paper posthumously.

This article explores public reactions to a murder of a foreign managing director running a French-owned textile factory in interwar Poland. The 1932 killing provoked an intense discussion in the press, which sheds light on Polish identity and narrative strategies used by the elites to rationalize the consequences of Poland’s peripheral economic status. The study is based on discourse analysis of over 200 press articles. I argue that commentators saw the killing as the result of French policies in the factory, and interpreted these in turn as the result of either the Polish government’s negligence, influenced by Paris’s diplomats, or of global capitalism. The most dramatic arguments framed French policies in Żyrardów as a form of colonialism or slavery. This framing was based on the journalists’ perception of French actions as transgressions of two imagined hierarchies: a geo-racial division of the world, and the local hierarchy of labor.

This paper explores fertility management practices in state-socialist Poland and investigates post-war demographic change through the lenses of gender and modernization. Using personal narratives from oral histories and memoirs, we examine reproductive decision-making processes from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on motivations, norms, and the means employed to achieve desired family size. Our analysis reveals the ambiguous nature of both modernization and women’s emancipation in regard to reproduction. We argue that acceptance of the two-child model and the need to effectively manage fertility increased in Poland through the second half of the twentieth century, but was highly dependent on levels of spousal communication and equality. Personal narratives demonstrate how social pressure shaped women’s reproductive choices, and how at times these choices were considerably limited by male violence and domination. As our analysis shows, gender relations in marriage and the modernization of fertility management in state-socialist Poland were deeply interrelated.

My article analyzes Venedikt Erofeev’s cultivation of weakness via alcoholic intoxication in Moskva-Petushki against the grain of its standard interpretations. The critical consensus holds that the protagonist (and by extension, the author, with whom he shares his name and autobiographical details) is a sober drunk and a holy fool. By contrast, I read the protagonist’s failure to reach his destination and his untimely death in a less celebratory light. Intoxication functions as a means of spiritual seclusion, of finding oneself through the process of “falling out” of all social systems. Via this categorical renunciation of any affiliation, the protagonist aims to escape conscription into any acts of cruelty or destruction ranging from historical atrocities to the most quotidian application of force. The protagonist makes a superhuman effort to avoid any form of belonging out of the ethical imperative not to injure, but ends up inflicting harm upon himself and his loved ones anyway. My point here, then, is that the poema does not celebrate the protagonist’s attempt to reach salvation via weakness and solitude, but ambivalently explores the aesthetic and ethical possibilities and limits of his choice as well as the feasibility and desirability of such radical freedom.