Kirjallisuushistoria, kaanon ja kansallinen identiteetti neuvostoajan jälkeisellä Venäjällä

• Kirsti Ekonen Helsingin yliopisto
• Sanna Turoma Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74943

Abstrakti

Literary History, Canon and National Identity in Post-Soviet Russia

The disintegration of the Soviet Union brought Russian-language cultural canons and institutions into turmoil. In this article, we approach the turmoil from a viewpoint that has gained little scholarly attention. This is the dynamics between literary history, canonizing processes, and national identity. To shed light on the role of literary history and its uses in contemporary Russia, we analyze Russian-language literary histories aimed at academic audiences, textbooks written for college-level as well as primary and secondary school students, and guidelines of literary education issued by the Ministry of Education and Sciences of the Russian Federation.

Our analysis shows that Russian-language literary histories offer a rather traditional view of literature and pay little attention to hybrid genres, nonfiction, or popular forms of writing. The textbooks often present the literary-historical narrative in an encyclopedic form structured around individual authors. Russian literary histories tend to highlight literature as a source of moral values; phenomena associated with social or political critique and aesthetic experimentation, such as the historical avant-garde, get less attention than more conservative movements. There is little room for questions of ethnicity and gender, and female writers are mostly absent, whereas the patriarchal values of village prose, for instance, are widely discussed. The teaching of literary history in college as well as at the primary and secondary school levels follows the patriotic identity politics articulated in the Foundations of State Cultural Politics issued by the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation in 2013.