The Slavic Literature Pod

Show Notes:
This week, Cameron and Una dig into Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Written after Chevengur, The Foundation Pit continues Platonov’s exploration of newly-formed Socialist life in the Soviet Union. He probes the building of not just socialism, but Soviet life through the lens of a cast of characters who are tasked with building an all-proletarian house to enshrine the collective future. 
A book about digging a pit on the surface, The Foundation Pit prods the Soviet obsession with big projects, post-revolution alienation, and whether the socialist future can survive the then-socialist present.

A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s “The Foundation Pit.”: https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/j.ctt1zxsjhv?searchText=the%20foundation%20pit&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dthe%2Bfoundation%2Bpit%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A8dbdfb68cf18a291ecb6c0a64baafd93

Check out Una's video on Platonov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFOJJTxq18s

This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.
The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 
Our links: Website | Discord⁠ | Patreon
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook
Questions, comments, threats? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Show Notes:
This week, Cameron is joined by Una Vulevic: a PhD student, Anna Karenina enthusiast and...a new co-host on the show. They'll talk a little bit about her background, how she got in to Slavic literature, the importance of highlighting women's often-overlooked contributions and our theory of Slavic lit podcasting.

Check out Una's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@slavicliteraturegirl
Una's Substack: https://substack.com/@slavicliteraturegirl

This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | Discord⁠ | Patreon
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Show Notes:
This week, Nina Kossman joins the podcast to talk about her upcoming book, No One Talks About the War: Travels in Ukraine During the War. A collection of short stories recollecting conversations she had while crossing Ukraine in 2023, No One Talks About the War seeks to simply document people. An attempt to avoid generalizing one person's view as everyone's perspective, her book catalogues everyday thoughts, opinions, gripes, and hopes from across the country.

Pre-order No One Talks About the War here (https://www.amazon.com/No-One-Talks-About-War-ebook/dp/B0H89TP8P6).

Nina Kossman is an award-winning bilingual writer, poet and translator. She’s written twelve books, including an anthology she put together for Oxford University Press, a book of vignettes about her childhood in the Soviet Union, several poetry collections and translations of Marina Tsvetaeva. 

This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.
The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | Discord⁠ | Patreon
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, threats? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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.academicstudiespress.com/9798897831197/).

Yuliya Ilchuk is an Associate Professor and the Director of Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Stanford University. Her first awards-winning book, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity ( published by the University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid. Her most recent book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine shifts the discussion from collective remembrance to the cultural dimensions of forgetting. Ilchuk has also published several translations of Ukrainian poetry and literary criticism in tandem with Amelia Glaser and by herself.  
Halyna Babak is an assistant professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Her research explores the intellectual history, literary theory, and literary production of 20th-century Ukraine within the broader context of Soviet and East European political and cultural history. She is the author of the monograph (in co-authorship with Alexander Dmitriev) Atlantida sovetskogo nacmodernizma. Formal'nyj metod v Ukraine (1920-e – načalo 1930-ch). (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021).

This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | Discord⁠ | Patreon
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, threats? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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 reflection on their world and a hopeful verse for the Kazakh future.

Buy a copy of Mosquito from Academic Studies Press here (https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9798897831616/) or get it wherever you buy your books.

Jake Zawlacki is a writer, translator, and scholar, and currently teaches writing at the University of San Diego. He is the editor of Conversations with Todd McFarlane and Conversations with Denys Cowan as well as the translator of the first English-language translation of Akhmet Baitursynov’s Mosquito. Zawlacki holds degrees from Louisiana State University, University of San Diego, and Stanford University, and his creative work has been published in The Saturday Evening Post, The Journal, Citron Review, and Roanoke Review.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands