"The Russophone Literature of Resistance": The Launch of March 2023 Issue of World Literature Today

This online event serves as a virtual launch event for the March/April issue of the magazine World Literature Today, which contains an extended cover feature on the Russophone literature of resistance. It will be moderated by Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University) and Kevin M. F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania), the co-editors of the special section, and will feature appearances by the writers Mikhail Shishkin, Maria Stepanova, and Ruthie Jenrbekova. This event is co-sponsored by World Literature Today, the Romanoff Center for Russian Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Russian & East European Studies as well as Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. The writers included in “The Russophone Literature of Resistance” represent a broad swath of contemporary Russian-language cultural production, transcending the contested borders of the Russian Federation proper: they include poets, novelists, critics, essayists, translators, cinema critics, publishers, bookstore owners, academics, festival organizers, and cultural impresarios writing in Russian but often with multilingual vocabularies and transnational topoi in their poems and essays. They share Russian as their common language of creative expression, not only centered in the cultural metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg but from far-flung outposts of post-Soviet geography and neo-Russian empire—or from oppositional spaces beyond its borders. To make the cover feature widely accessible to readers around the world, WLT is making the entire section free to read during the month of March 2023. (The digital edition, which can be read on the WLT website, will go live on February 27.) In solidarity with the people of Ukraine, WLT is also (once again) making the July 2022 cover feature devoted to Odesa and Kharkiv—which included responses by Ukrainian writers to the Russian invasion and the first months of the war—freely available during the month of March.

Speakers Ruthie Jenrbekova, PhD Candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Mikhail Shishkin, Prominent Author of fiction and essays
Maria Stepanova, Poet and Essayist
Mark Lipovetsky, Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University
Kevin M.F. Platt, Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Daniel Simon, Editor in Chief and Assistant Director, World Literature Today
Emily D. Johnson, Co-Director of the Romanoff Center for Russian Studies, Brian and Sandra O'Brien Presidential Professor of Russian, University of Oklahoma