The Slavic Literature Pod
The Slavic Literature Pod is your guide to the literary traditions in and around the Slavic world. On each episode, Cameron Lallana sits down with scholars, translators and other experts to dive deep into big books, short stories, film, and everything in between. You’ll get an approachable introduction to the scholarship and big ideas surrounding these canons roughly two Fridays per month.
Episodes
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron dives into the various forces in Ukrainian literature, theory, and criticism shortly after the turn of the 20th century. To help him wrap his head around the topic. Drs. Halyna Babak and Yuliya Ilchuk join the podcast to talk about their new readers Ukrainian Literary Modernism of the 1910s to Mid-1930s, Vol. 1 &2.
Buy either volume of Ukrainian Literary Modernism here (https://www.academicstudiespr...
Show Notes:
This week, Jake Zawlacki joins Cameron to talk about his translation of Akhmet Baitursynov's Mosquito. Although it's appearing in English now for the first time, the collection itself is more than a century old--originally published in 1911, Mosquito is a clarion call to the Kazakh people. Living in land still subject to the Russian empire, Baitursynov's collection is a political tract, an appeal for unity, a sorrowful r...
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron (finally) dives into Lydia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna. A novel about the Great Terror written during the Great Terror, Chukovskaya's eponymous character lives a fairly comfortable Soviet life -- until her son is arrested for an unspecified crime.
Splitting its time between prison lines and a workplace growing rife with denunciations and arrests, Sofia Petrovna memorializes a moment most people would r...
Show Notes:
This week, on For Your Consideration, Cameron dives into John Williams' 1960 novel, Butcher's Crossing, a cautionary tale about how reading Ralph Waldo Emerson can drive you into buffalo-murdering madness.
It's not uncommon to see the novel compared to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, but after reading both...he's skeptical. It seems that they don't share much more than a genre.
This e...
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron dives into Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” a dramatization of one chapter of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate: the final letter Anna Semionova writes her son, Viktor Shtrum, from a Jewish ghetto.
We’ll get into how Wiseman adapts this troubling, poignant chapter into film, why I think this chapter is the best enca...
Show Notes:
This week, you and Cameron get into some PREP WORK for an upcoming episode about Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” which dramatizes a chapter of Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate.
In preparation for that episode, we’ll read that dramatized chapter — Part 1, Chapter 18, Anna Semyonova’s final letter to her son, Viktor...
Show Notes:
This week, Dr. José Vergara returns to the podcast to talk about Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools. The novel, first published in English in 1977, follows student so-and-so (and his double) as he attempts to tell events of his life. The novel doesn’t follow a linear plot — or even an easy-to-distinguish narrator — and puts you on your toes as you meander between st...
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron takes on the back half of Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, covering chapters 25-43. As our characters finally arrive in the town of Chevengur, we go from a picaresque romp around the newly-Soviet countryside into the dirty work of actually building Communism.
“Danger and Deliverance: Reading Andrei Platonov” by Angela Livingstone
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron returns to the beginning of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Ukrainian Trilogy with “Zvenihora.” The film, released in 1928, explores a thousand years of Ukrainian history — spanning from Varangian invasion to the rise of the Soviet Union. The film is a fascinating take on Soviet film, mashing together Ukrainian culture and the new, Soviet reality.
You may ha...
Show Notes:
This week, we see that every author starts somewhere in Anton Chekhov, Earliest Stories: Stories, Novellas, Humoresques, 1880-1882. To talk about Chekhov’s earliest published stories, Cameron sits down with Elena Michajlowska and Rosamund Bartlett. The pair not only edited the collection, but also oversaw the unusual editing process that involved 83 other translators across the world.
They’ll talk about where ...
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron talks a little bit about director Sergei Parajanov’s “Sayat Nova” (also known as The Color of Pomegranates), and five other films he really liked this year.
Want to see the video version of this episode? Check it out here: https://youtu.be/khXaVt0ilFc
Also, sorry, the name of the theater is Dreamland Cinema. I forgot to say that in the video.
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron dives into the final entry into Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Silent Trilogy, “Earth” (1930). The film’s deceptively simple plot—of a tractor delivery to a collectivizing village in Ukraine is followed by the murder of a local Bolshevik organizer—doesn’t hinder its avant-garde stylings, employing a montage of loose logical associat...
Show Notes:
This week, Ally Pitts — host of A Russian & Soviet Movie Podcast — joins Cameron to talk about the book Not Russian by Mikhail Shevelev. The book follows veteran journalist Pavel Vladimirovich as an old friend’s sudden reappearance at the head of a terror attack forces him to reflect on his history as a Russian journalist and how things turned out this way.
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron dives into Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, covering chapters 1 through 25. Through the late Russian Empire into the early Soviet Union, Sasha Dvanov is finally orphaned when his fisherman father drowns in an attempt to understand his all-knowing, deathless fish. Growing up in the shuffling shadow of the new world, he joins the Bolshevik party and seeks to spread commu...
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron returns to Vasily Grossman, covering his first novel of World War II, The People Immortal. The novel follows the Red Army through the early days of the war: losing battles, ceding ever more ground, and quickly losing hope.
Although this novel doesn’t contain the philosophical and critical heights of his later two novels, The People Immortal...
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron dives into Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic and Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger, trying to probe the question plaguing recent episodes: “What is the value of art during wartime?”
Deaf Republic tells an all-too-familiar parable of a town under occupation, subjected to abuse and murder, and how the people there chose their own forms...
We were supposed to talk about Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic and Fan Hai's Delicious Hunger today, but the episode's audio is trapped on a dead computer. You can look forward to listening to (a probably re-recorded) episode on Monday.
Since we have the time, I wanted to take a step back and discuss the ever-evolving reason for this podcast. It's hard to talk about "just" literature right now. But I think it's still worthwhile. We'll...
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron continues speaking about Yevgenia Belorusets’ work with War Diary and also explores the experience of women living through war in Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of Doves.
War Diary catalogues the first 40 days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, capturing the turbulence and violence while never forgetting to focus on th...
Show Notes:
This week, Cameron talks about unreliable narrators in Yevgenia Belorusets’ Lucky Breaks and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, posing an unusual argument: what if lying to your reader was a good thing?
Belorusets is a Ukrainian writer whose work focuses on the people marginalized by society and takes that eye toward the East, writing stories ...
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