One Century Apart: Russian Avant-Garde and the Nineteenth-Century Colonial Expansion (with Anna Aydinyan)

Presenting her book Formalists against Imperialism: The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar and Russian Orientalism (2022), Anna Aydinyan will concentrate on the relationship between the Russian Avant-Garde of the 1920s and cultural tendencies of the 1820s. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian poets, writers and literary scholars critically reexamined nineteenth-century literature in its connection with Russia's imperial expansion. The most important of these reevaluations was Yuri Tynianov’s 1929 novel The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar. It explored the phenomenon of Russian Orientalism through a parody of the nineteenth-century texts. The novel underscores the role of the romantic nationalism of Pushkin’s and Griboedov’s generation in its imperial projects. It also examines the legacy of the ideas of the Enlightenment in the cultural and political discourse of the early nineteenth century. While Tynianov’s novel reveals the interconnectedness between literary Orientalism and imperial expansion, his fellow formalist Shklovsky’s memoirs Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922 openly denounces imperialism. The formalists expressed their moral involvement in the
problem by alluding to the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment to which they “offered their hands over the head of the XIX century.”

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Anna Aydinyan is an Associate Professor of Russian at Kenyon College, Ohio.