Paper long abstract:

In June 2014, not long after the Russian Federation’s annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin asserted a moral imperative to defend not only ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, but also non-Russians “who maintain a cultural and linguistic connection with Russia, who feel themselves to be a part of the “wider Russian world [shirokogo russkogo mira].” What exactly are the boundaries of this world, and who is included in it? The Russian president’s words point to the imagined portability, durability, and universality of the Russian language and culture, as well as the perceived ability of Russian speakers, regardless of ethnicity or nationality, to constitute a global body politic. In light of this contemporary ideological positioning of the Russian language, in my paper I consider the effects of Russian state power and transnational Russophone institutions on Central Asian literary production and reception.

I situate contemporary Russophone Central Asian writers and culture workers—who employ the Russian language with varying degrees of dissociation from an ethnic or national Russian-ness--at the nexus of varying and often contradictory processes of identity formation on local, national, and global levels. Through an analysis of prose and poetry works by writers from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, I highlight the complex, multidiscursive elements involved in constructing--and critiquing--Russian-ness and “Russian worlds."