NARRAZIONI IN LINGUA RUSSA DAL CAUCASO SETTENTRIONALE POST-SOVIETICO: IDENTITÀ E MEMORIA NELLE OPERE DI ALISA GANIEVA, DINA ARMA E GERMAN SADULAEV
Tesi di Dottorato
Data di Pubblicazione:
2023
Citazione:
NARRAZIONI IN LINGUA RUSSA DAL CAUCASO SETTENTRIONALE POST-SOVIETICO: IDENTITÀ E MEMORIA NELLE OPERE DI ALISA GANIEVA, DINA ARMA E GERMAN SADULAEV / V. Marcati ; tutor: M. Schruba; co-tutor: M. Boschiero; coordinatore: M. V. Calvi. Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, Culture e Mediazioni, 2023 Sep 21. 35. ciclo, Anno Accademico 2022.
Abstract:
Internal and external migration processes, as well as the policies of linguistic acculturation and assimilation that affected the Russian Empire and its successor states, have given Russian literature and culture a widespread and polycentric character. Literary and cultural production in the Russian language, in fact, transcends Russia’s national borders and involves a plurality of actors differing in terms of citizenship and ethnicity. In particular, as far as literature is concerned, the Russian Empire’s and Soviet Union’s linguistic and cultural policies toward ethnic minorities resulted in the birth of a Russian-language literature by non-Russian ethnic authors. Several studies have dealt with this phenomenon in the former Soviet republics, while significantly less attention has been paid to the Russian-language literature of the indigenous minorities of the Russian Federation. The current work contributes to filling this gap by examining the contemporary literary production of non-Russian authors from the North Caucasus, a region that has been shaped in Russian imagination as a “Domestic East” since its violent conquest by the Tsarist Empire (19th century). The research focused on two interconnected topics – identity and memory – which were explored in the works of fiction (short stories, povest’, and novels) by three North Caucasian writers – Alisa Ganieva (b. 1985), Dina Arma (pseudonym of Madina Chakuaševa, b. 1959), and German Sadulaev (b. 1973) – with the aim of offering a “marginal” perspective, still missing, on the identity dynamics affecting contemporary Russia. To that purpose, a theoretical framework that combines tools from Postcolonial theories with those from Memory and Trauma Studies was used. The first chapter of this work establishes the historical and cultural context for the study’s subject. First, the main historical stages of the North Caucasian peoples’ complex relationship with (imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet) Russia are depicted, as are the circumstances that led to other North Caucasian peoples being regarded as exotic outsiders. Secondly, an in-depth overview of Russia’s identity and memory policies from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present is provided. The second chapter addresses the issue of the canon of socialist realism in its relation to the literature of the peoples of the USSR. The first part of the chapter demonstrates how the Soviet canon contributed to spread the Orientalist discourse in the literature of the USSR’s socalled “Asian” peoples. By analysing Ganieva’s novel Prazdničnaja gora [The Festive Mountain, 2012], it is demonstrated how, by employing the tools of parody and “plurivocity”, the author creates a work capable of deconstructing dominant discourses (including that of Soviet Orientalism) and proposes a new type of narrative about the Caucasus. The second part of the chapter looks at how non-Russian writers used local cultural elements in Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Through an examination of two works – Sadulaev’s composition Illi (2006) and Ganieva’s novel Ženich i nevesta [Groom and Bride, 2015] – it is demonstrated that the local tradition, from being a “shell” filled with ideological messages and a purely decorative factor in Soviet multinational literature, becomes a structural element capable of mediating new meanings in the work of the two writers: on the one hand, providing a way to discuss the identity and moral crises of post-war Chechnya (Sadulaev), and on the other, by creating a selectively “opaque” text that can be interpreted differently depending on the reader’s cultural background (Ganieva). The third chapter explores the concept of “home” and its opposite, homelessness, which are
Tipologia IRIS:
Tesi di dottorato
Keywords:
Russophone literature; North Caucasus; post-Soviet Russia; Alisa Ganieva; Dina Arma; German Sadulaev; Postcolonial Studies; Memory and Trauma Studies; Identity; letteratura russofona; Caucaso settentrionale; Russia post-sovietica; studi postcoloniali; studi sulla memoria e sul trauma; identità
Elenco autori:
V. Marcati
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