Please join us for a lecture by Daria Ezerova,
“Derelict Futures: Soviet Industrial Space in Contemporary Russian Culture.”
Tuesday Dec. 5, 11:50-1:00, 112 Boger Hall
Daria Ezerova is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation is titled “Derelict Futures: The Spaces of Socialism in Contemporary Russian Literature and Film.” Her research focuses on contemporary Russian culture and the extent to which it demonstrates the continuity of Soviet models of representation. She considers examples from literature, drama, and film from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s and compares them with the landmarks of Soviet culture. The primary focus of her dissertation is the representation of space. Through exploring the interrelationship between space and time in the periods of radical political transition, she argues that after the fall of the USSR capitalism substituted itself for Soviet Marxism as the tutelary spirit that invested space with a sense of the future, and Russian culture briefly renewed its belief in progress. But this optimism proved to be short-lived: in the Putin era, a new sense of space emerged in the literary and cinematic counter-culture that that was marked by the acute absence of any scenario suggesting temporal progress.