Thomas Grob (University of Basel)
The last years’ literary discourses in Russia witness the re-emergence of interest in political issues, reflected in various creative forms fluctuating between fiction and essays. The ensuing effects include, apart from reconditioning and diversification of inter-genre relations, the increasingly complicated, if not disturbing blurring of traditional political categories such as ‘right‘ or ‘left‘ as well as of notions such as ‘national‘ and ‘imperial‘ in the respective literary texts. These latter political stances are sometimes manifested by their advocates in a very emphatic or polemic way, and often come close together. The talk intends to review this ostensibly new nationalist-imperialist tendency in the perspective of recent imperial studies and space models presented in the texts of this ‘movement‘ which is far more heterogeneous than it might seem at a glance. The stress will be made on the representations of Chechnya as a highly relevant literary topos of the last decade.