Myka Tucker-Abramson is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Her work has been published in PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, and Feminist Theory. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Cartographies of Empire: the Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford University Press 2025) 

The post-socialist transition road novel 

From Ingo Schulze's Adam and Evelyn to Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad and Lana Bastašić’s Catch the Rabbit, a remarkably diverse range of authors have turned to the genre of the road novel to narrate the transition from socialism to capitalism. This paper asks why and what work these road novels do. Challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as a distinctly American genre that reckons with domestic questions of automobility and national identity, I explore the way that these writers have taken up and transformed the genre to interrogate experiences of the collapsing socialist life-world: rapid privatization and dispossession, growing ethnonationalism, frustrated desires for progress and modernization, and the foreclosure of alternative visions of modernity. Focusing on two exemplary post-socialist road novels, Iva Pekárková’s Truck Stop Rainbows (1989) and Zachary Karabashliev’s 18% Gray (2014), this talk will show how their seemingly celebratory  deployment of the American genre, with its embedded developmentalist conceptions of freedom, in fact offer sharp, critical accounts of capitalist transition that disrupts a determinist or stagist reading of history and even recuperate what Susan Buck Morss has referred to as the promise of socialism’s “mass dreamworld.” 

Series Convenors: 

Sara Bernard, CEES, University of Glasgow, sara.bernard@glasgow.a.c.uk 

Taras Fedirko, Social Anthropology and Migration, University of Glasgow, taras.fedirko@glasgow.ac.uk 

The CEES Seminar Series is kindly supported by the Macfie Bequest. 

First published: 1 January 2025

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Dr Sara Bernard

Dr Taras Fedirko