About

Back to the Future is a digital exhibition featuring the work of students in Professor José Vergara’s course RUSS005 Back to the Future: Contemporary Russian Culture & Society (Fall 2020) at Swarthmore College. These student-generated exhibit-pages explore various "nodes" in the post-Soviet world.

The Project

As part of their efforts to understand the state of contemporary post-Soviet culture and society, students in RUSS005 collectively built this website featuring a series of exhibits on key nodes: relations between Russia and the West; feminism, sexuality, and gender; economics; health; protest and civil dissent; history; relations with former Soviet states; race, ethnicity, and nationality; church and state; and traditionalism vs. progressivism.

This scaffolded, semester-long project consisted of four smaller assignments: documenting of and weekly responses to news articles, an in-class presentation, an individual node exhibit, and a small-group node exhibit.

At the beginning of the semester, students selected a node, and then, from early September through late November, they read at least one news article related to their selected node per week. Articles were to be drawn as much as possible from a range of sources based in Russia and/or produced by Russian journalists. After tracing and writing about their selected subject for several months, they generated the present exhibits, which provide a synthetic framework. 

Likewise, in their exhibits, students in RUSS005 make links between the news stories and the various primary texts we read throughout the semester. The goal here is not necessarily to identify direct connections, but rather to show how artistic works have also been grappling with the same themes in multifarious ways over the last thirty years. Whether looking back into the past, or looking forward to the future, the conversation is ongoing.

Interviews with Writers

Throughout the semester, we had the opportunity to speak with six of our authors: Sergei Gandlevsky, Mikhail Shishkin, Alisa Ganieva, Galina Rymbu, and Ksenia Buksha. Students developed questions for each of these interviews based on our class discussions and their individual interests. 

The Course

Hailed as the “end of history” by political scientist Frances Fukuyama, the fall of the Soviet Union brought yet another identity crisis to Russia. Having lived under Communist rule for nearly 75 years, the country experienced a need to define itself vis-à-vis the rest of the world, a past that had long been distorted, and a new reality pregnant with possibility. 

The works we studied can be grouped into two broad categories. On the one hand, some of them may be read (viewed, examined) as statements on the cultural, historical, or political issues from which they directly sprang. They take up such issues as protest movements, corruption, poverty, and uncertain national identities. On the other hand, several turn their creative vision back to the pre- and early-Soviet eras. These texts can be said to participate in a metamodernist experiment; they resurrect the past, its traumas (e.g., war, stagnation, the Leningrad Siege), and its artistic devices in an effort to understand better how Russia became what it is today. Of course, the lines between these two approaches often blur, and we examined how and why they do so. Furthermore, all these works attempt to diagnose a problem—historical and/or contemporary—but they also attempt to find a way forward, to generate productive links and possibilities.

We began with a historical survey of the last 30 years in Russia, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the dawn of Putin’s “zeroed-out” reign, paired with a selection of short stories by Ludmila Petrushevskaya and Viktor Pelevin. Next came Sergei Gandlevsky’s Trepanation of the Skull, a memoir chronicling the writer’s Soviet experiences and life in post-Soviet Russia on the eve of his brain surgery. As an introduction to the naturalistic genre of New Drama, we read Playing the Victim by the Presnyakov Brothers. From there, we also explored Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, a bizarre satire that blends the age of Ivan the Terrible with the logical outcome of a Putinesque regime, and Mikhail Shishkin’s epistolary novel The Light and the Dark, which also straddles time periods with its star-crossed lovers: a contemporary Russian woman and a soldier in the Russo-Japanese War. Alisa Ganieva’s The Mountain & the Wall, the first Dagestani novel translated into English, explores ethnic conflict and fundamentalism as a wall is constructed between Dagestan and the rest of Russia. The scholarly and poetic work of Polina Barskova, a leading expert on the Leningrad Siege, offer a look at one of the darkest moments in Russian history through both her poetry and scholarship, and Kantemir Balagov’s film Beanpole underscores the aftereffects of such a traumatic experience. Galina Rymbu’s wide-ranging poetry touched on key topics such as feminism, environmental catastrophe, and everyday life in Eastern Europe. Finally, Ksenia Buksha’s playful The Freedom Factory documented the transition from Soviet Russia and Socialist Realism to post-Soviet and postmodern Russia from the perspective of… a factory. 

We hope that this digital exhibition will help generate further dialogue regarding the region, its cultural productions and their ties to the contexts from which they arose, and the manifold topics explored throughout these pages.

Site supported by Digital Scholarship / Swarthmore College Libraries

Special thanks to Nabil Kashyap, Digital Scholarship Librarian