The Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies Emerging Voices in REEES Colloquium presents
Emily Laskin, Ph.D Candidate, University of California, Berkeley:
“Geopoetics of the Steppe.”
Register here. http://bit.ly/REEES-EmilyLaskin
Russian writers have long noticed the expansiveness of Eurasia and wondered about its significance. Some have characterized Russia and its borderlands as vast undifferentiated space, incapable, in contrast to Western Europe, of generating meaning. At the same time, the steppe—the landscape most closely associated with unbounded space—occupies a special place in the Russian cultural imagination of Russia and Russianness. This talk gives a brief history of the Russian literary steppe and then presents the the example of Nikolai Karazin. A popular novelist in the late 19th century, Karazin published several historical novels about the Russian conquest of Turkestan, representing the “emtpy” landscapes of Central Asia as simultaneously foreign and “naturally” Russian.
Emily Laskin is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is completing a dissertation on the literature of and about Central Asia during the late nineteenth century. She also holds an M.A. in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Regional studies from Columbia University. Her research is forthcoming in Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Modernism/Modernity, and one of her literary translations is forthcoming in the collection Tulips in Bloom: An Anthology of Modern Central Asian Literature (Palgrave Macmillan), of which she is also an editor.