Edith W. Clowes

This project addresses symbolic geographies and identity in contemporary Russian writing culture. It examines the process of cultural regeneration in post-Soviet Russia and in contemporary writing articulations of identity that move beyond the traumas of the post-Soviet moment. There is a pattern of movement away from the old center of Soviet ideology in Moscow to "peripheral" symbolic-geographical spaces that free the writer to probe submerged aspects of Russia’s complex cultural heritage in those settings and to express alternate concepts of self. This project is the first lengthy study to address significant Russian literary and philosophical articulations of identity after the loss of empire.