Thursday 29th October 2015, 5pm
Glasgow University Library, Room 306 (TalkLab)

Prof. Marina Balina (Illinois Wesleyan University, Isaac Funk Professor and Professor of Russian Studies)
Pinocchio’s Adventures in the Wonderland: Texts and Contexts of Soviet Children’s Literature

“Utopian elements structure multiple aspects of Soviet culture, a fact recognized by literati and scholars in disciplines ranging from cultural and literary studies to sociology and political science. Both Western and post-Soviet scholars of Russian literature of the Soviet period have made a persuasive argument for the reliance of Soviet utopian discourse on the Russian fairy-tale tradition. Although specialists of Soviet literary and cultural history repeatedly invoke the fairy-tale paradigm to describe the utopian features of Soviet culture, the Soviet fairy tale as a literary genre has yet to be investigated as an independent subject. The talk is based on a particular case study of the Soviet literary fairy tale that belongs to the canon of works for Soviet children - Aleksei Tolstoi’s The Golden Key or The Adventures of Buratino (1936) and its transformation into two different film versions: one of 1939 and another one, almost 40 years later, of 1976.”

Marina Balina's published research has focused on contemporary Russian life writing: autobiography, memoir, and travelogue. Her articles and reviews have appeared in critical anthologies and such journals as Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Slavonic and East European Review, and a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

She has co-edited Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Empire Style (with Nancy Condee and Evgeny Dobrenko, Northwestern UP, 2000), Sovetskoe Bogatstvo: Stat’i o literature, kul’ture i kino (with Evgeny Dobrenko and Yuri Murashov, Akademicheskii proekt, 2002), Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers since 1980 (with Mark Lipovetsky, Thomson & Gale Publishers, 2003), an anthology of Russian and Soviet fairy tales, Politicizing Magic (with Helena Goscilo and Mark Lipovetsky, Northwestern UP, 2005), Russian Children’s Literature and Culture (with Larissa Rudova, Routledge Press, 2007), Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (with Evgeny Dobrenko, Anthem press, 2009), The Cambridge Companion to Russian Literature (with Evgeny Dobrenko, Cambridge University Press, 2011) and "Ubitʹ Charskuiu…" : paradoksy sovetskoi literatury dlia deteii [1920-e - 1930-e gg.] (with Valerii V'iugin, Ateleia, 2013).

TheCentre for Russian, Central and East European Studies  (CRCEES ) Russian Culture Seminar Series is organised together with the Russian team at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (SMLC) of the University of Glasgow.  For further information on the series please contact Dr Andrea Gullotta

First published: 29 October 2015

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