{"title":"“Where Are You Going to Live? In What Language?”: The Search for Identity in Iurii Serebrianskii’s Russophone Prose","authors":"Nina Friess","doi":"10.1016/j.ruslit.2021.10.002","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Identity is the overarching topic connecting most of the texts written by Iurii Serebrianskii, one of the leading representatives of so-called “Young” Russophone literature in Kazakhstan. This paper analyses how the topic is presented and what concepts of identity are integrated in four of the author’s best known works: <em>Destination. Dorozhnaia pastoral’</em> (2010), <em>Prazhaki</em> (2014), <em>Kazakhstanskie skazki</em> (2017), and <em>Altynshash</em> (2018). I argue that Serebrianskii’s use of the Russian language, together with his explicit self-positioning in the Russophone world rather than the Russian world, is significant in the first two texts but loses importance through the later course of his work, both on a textual level and beyond. This development corresponds to a change in Serebrianskii’s reading audience. While he targeted a broader Russophone readership in his early work, he wrote his latter works for a primarily Kazakhstani readership, thereby shaping the emerging discourse of a polyphonic Kazakhstani identity.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":43192,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","volume":"127 ","pages":"Pages 127-149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347921000624/pdfft?md5=0232195d3e1e16334683c72ba673f95d&pid=1-s2.0-S0304347921000624-main.pdf","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347921000624","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, SLAVIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Identity is the overarching topic connecting most of the texts written by Iurii Serebrianskii, one of the leading representatives of so-called “Young” Russophone literature in Kazakhstan. This paper analyses how the topic is presented and what concepts of identity are integrated in four of the author’s best known works: Destination. Dorozhnaia pastoral’ (2010), Prazhaki (2014), Kazakhstanskie skazki (2017), and Altynshash (2018). I argue that Serebrianskii’s use of the Russian language, together with his explicit self-positioning in the Russophone world rather than the Russian world, is significant in the first two texts but loses importance through the later course of his work, both on a textual level and beyond. This development corresponds to a change in Serebrianskii’s reading audience. While he targeted a broader Russophone readership in his early work, he wrote his latter works for a primarily Kazakhstani readership, thereby shaping the emerging discourse of a polyphonic Kazakhstani identity.
期刊介绍:
Russian Literature combines issues devoted to special topics of Russian literature with contributions on related subjects in Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak and Polish literatures. Moreover, several issues each year contain articles on heterogeneous subjects concerning Russian Literature. All methods and viewpoints are welcomed, provided they contribute something new, original or challenging to our understanding of Russian and other Slavic literatures. Russian Literature regularly publishes special issues devoted to: • the historical avant-garde in Russian literature and in the other Slavic literatures • the development of descriptive and theoretical poetics in Russian studies and in studies of other Slavic fields.