Guest lecture for the Russian Space (RSCPR) Research Group
The lecture examines representations of non-capital Russian cities in 21st century Russian literature. The focus is on works, which depict the Soviet and post-Soviet non-capital urbanisation, and often either challenge or reproduce stereotypical views of Russian provincial life. Soviet era texts, explored in parallel with the contemporary material, form the previous tradition of depicting the urbanisation processes. The lecture analyses texts about Murmansk and Salekhard, and an unnamed provincial city in the novel by Dmitri Danilov, asking how the protagonists experience the contemporary city space and its omnipresent Soviet past.
The Arctic cities of Russia form a special topic of their own in the study of contemporary non-capital urban space. The first part of the lecture seeks to demonstrates how the urbanization of the city of Murmansk is depicted from the Soviet literature of the 1920s to the present day. Special attention is paid to how the texts portray the surrounding Arctic nature as an inseparable part of the urban space, and how the protagonists understand the impact of geographical factors on their urban experience.
The same or similar questions about Soviet history and Northern nature are central also in the graphic novel Polunochnaia zemlia (2017) by Yulia Nikitina, in its the study of the city of Salekhard in the Arctic. Nikitina’s novel offers a female perspective to the Russian Arctic, which has traditionally been a territory dominated by male voices in history as well as in the cultural imagination. The lecture investigates how the graphic novel renews the idea of a city text, and how it could be explored in the context of Russian semiotic tradition of examining texts about urban spaces (Iuri Lotman and Vladimir Toporov), as well as from the point of view of geo-criticism (Bertrand Westphal).
Finally, the lecture introduces the contemporary author Dmitri Danilov and accounts for how he –with some irony– problematises the Russian literary tradition’s depiction of urban spaces beyond the capital. Combining the genres of literary fiction, journalism, and the travelogue, Danilov has explored over twenty smaller Russian cities in his novels and essays, and his contemporary version of “City of N.” reorganize the relationship between the referential city, a city text and a reader.
Anni Lappela is a PhD Candidate at the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation examines urban spaces of non-capital cities in contemporary Russian literature. She is especially interested in how Arctic cities, Soviet urbanization, and stereotypes of provincial life are represented in the post-Soviet literature. Lappela is also editor-in-chief of the journal of the Society of Russian Literature in Finland and secretary of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS). Before her PhD studies, she worked in the Murmansk office of the Consulate General of Finland.