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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.