The Human Body and the Environment in Russian and Soviet Literature and Culture (19th - 21st Centuries) - 09.-10. Juni 2022

Venue: Seidlvilla, Nikolaiplatz 1b, 80802 München
Concept and Organisation: Elena Fratto / Riccardo Nicolosi

The embeddedness of the human body in the surrounding environment, a major topic in both the medical and the environmental humanities today, has been addressed in Russian literature and the arts since the nineteenth century. Sometimes on the basis of scientific, sociological, and economic theories, sometimes independently, writers have staged the human body as porous to the natural and physical environment—water, soil, landscape, nonhuman animals, outer space—as well as to the social environment, urban and architectural layouts, the workspace and machinery, economic models, systems of values, and the circulation of goods and ideas. We invite papers that explore these complex connections and mutual exchanges in Russian literature and the arts of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following: the nineteenth-century concepts of milieu and sreda, the human body and natural disaster, physical/mental health and the environment, the workers’ bodies within natural or human-made environments, food studies, outer-space exploration.

Program

Thursday, June 9

9:30 Elena Fratto / Riccardo Nicolosi: Welcome remarks
9:45 Melissa Miller: “Embedded Bodies in Tolstoy’s War and Peace”
10:45 Coffee break
11:15 Riccardo Nicolosi: “Slumming Moscow”
12:15 Lunch break
14:00 Matthew Mangold: “The Environments of Sakhalin Island”
15:00 Alec Brookes: “Making Kith in the Tragic Menagerie”
16:00 Coffee break
16:30 Irina Sirotkina: “The Body’s Place in Cosmic Space: Harmonizing Movement and Nature in Early-Twentieth-Century Russia”

Friday, June 10

9:00 Colleen McQuillen: “Texture and Ornament: Haptic and Affective Engagement with Kustar’ Revival Interiors”
10:00 Philipp Kohl: “Fossil work: Imagining Human Sediments in Soviet Prose Around 1930 (Shaginyan, Paustovsky, Prishvin)”
11:00 Coffee break
11:30 Susanne Frank: “Man and Earth Change Their SKIN: Ecological Imagery in Bruno Jasienski’s Construction-novel from 1932”
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Elena Fratto: “Metabolic Modernities: Energy Transformations Across the Human-Nonhuman Divide in Early Soviet Prose”
15:00 Mika Perkiömäki: “What is Russian Cli-Fi?”
16:00 Coffee break
16:30 Julia Vaingurt: “Invasive Species: The Reach and Limit of Human Agency in Contemporary Outbreak Narratives”