American Horror Story: Liberalism and the Russian Dystopian Imagination’
Speakers): Eliot Borenstein, New York University
America has haunted Russian culture for decades, as an object of both love and disdain (most recently, of course, the “love” has been in short supply). The narratives of Anti-Americanism in Russia are numerous, from post-Cold War resentment to anti-globalist economic protest, from disgust for American popular superculture to the paranoid conviction that everything bad in Russia is a result of an American plot. But there is one strain whose expression is particularly literary: condemning the scourge of liberalism and the rhetoric of “political correctness” as a dystopian threat to Russian traditions and statehood. The past decade has seen the development of “liberpunk,” a new subgenre of Russian science fiction that is itself a marginal literary phenomenon, yet has played a role in elaborating a new political vocabulary. Its lexicon has gained prominence in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, namely by means of the straightforward rejection of tolerance as an alien, anti-Russian value that can cause only harm. This talk has multiple goals: first, to flesh out the connections between a particular right-wing ideology and an emerging Russian literary genre; second, to provide a case study in the multilateral appropriations and misappropriations of key artistic and ideological concepts as they move back and forth across borders; and third, to elaborate our understanding of the role of ideology in science fiction—and science fiction in ideology—in the punk phenomenon of contemporary Russia.
ELIOT BORENSTEIN is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University. His publications include Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1919 and Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture. A 2009 Guggenheim recipient, Borenstein is working on two projects: a monograph entitled Russia's Alien Nations: Imagining the Other after Socialism, and an essay collection called Catastrophe of the Week: Apocalyptic Entertainment in Post-Soviet Russia. He is also the editor of All the Russias, the blog site and web portal for the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia ().