FENGHI, Curriculum Vitae

2006

Studies in East European Thought, 2011

This article discusses the role of representative strategies in twentieth-century Russian culture. Just as Russia interacted with Europe in the Marquis de Custine’s time via discourse and representation, in the twentieth century Russia re-entered European consciousness by simulating ‘socialism’. In the post-Soviet era, the nation aspired to be admitted to the ‘European house’ by simulating a ‘market economy’, ‘democracy’, and ‘postmodernism’. But in reality Russia remains the same country as before, torn between the reality of its own helplessness and poverty, and the messianic myth of its own greatness. Post-Soviet culture is a product of Stalinist culture. ‘Russian postmodernism’ was created less by artists, writers, poets, and film makers, than by theorists and critics. At the beginning of the 1990s, a need to describe contemporary Russian culture emerged. In this way, ‘Russian postmodernism’ arose from the desire to ‘sell’ projects in the West—from the simple obligation to describe socialist experience in concrete, transferable terms that Westerners could grasp. The nostalgia experienced by the post-Soviet era creates its own simulated postmodernism, in which the matrices of the construction and functioning of culture cease to be connected with specifically Russian (Soviet) history, and instead reproduce Western models almost exactly. We are facing yet another attempt at radical cultural modernization. If the first attempt (revolutionary culture) was the most original and fruitful, and the second (Stalinist culture, Socialist Realism) was less productive but still original, then the third, post-Soviet, attempt (rich in individuality, but lacking in original ideas or style) is for the moment the least productive and original. If we exclude sots-art (conceptualism) from ‘Russian postmodernism’, there would be nothing left. Clearly, an original cultural model in post-Soviet Russia will not take shape until original strategies for processing the country’s cultural past are developed. In their turn, these strategies can only result from a radical transformation of post-Soviet identity into a new, genuinely Russian one.

The package is based on a course taught by the author at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A set of five DVDs contain around 1,000 images organized into 38 lectures that are grouped into five major topics: Moscow, Petersburg, Soviet Russia, Russian art, and Russia in Transition. Each narrated lecture consists of approximately 30 images that cover both “high” and “low” culture. Lectures are presented in the form of a self-running slid show, and each lecture lasts between twelve and fifteen minutes.

UCLA Historical Journal, 2006

This special issue emerged from the eponymous interdisciplinary conference we co-organized at the University of Sheffield in October 2010. The conference aimed to address the relationship between contemporary Russian culture and Russia's Soviet past, a relationship characterized by profound ambiguity. We approached this topic with the assumption that, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian society and culture are still dependent on their Soviet heritage, which is upheld and rejected, often simultaneously, in practically all fields of symbolic production, from state ideology to architecture, from elite literature to mass culture. Russian culture remains suspended between the historical narratives of the emergence of the new nation from the ruins of the USSR and the Soviet cultural legacy, whose models are no longer functional; the result is the instability of its ideological symbolic order and a palpable traumatic void, which its subjects fill with their incoherent, emotional, and ideologically charged interventions.

SLAVONIC & EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW, 2022

Nikolai Chernyshevskii (1828–89), a major nineteenth-century writer and thinker, continues to play in important role in contemporary Russian culture as a subject of artistic performances and political discussions. This article argues that the current regenerative engagement with Chernyshevskii’s legacy was preceded by another period of intense fascination with the writer and his work, specifically in late Soviet conceptualist art. It examines representations of Chernyshevskii in different media created in the period from 1980 to 1991: sots-art paintings by Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, essays and performances by Moscow Conceptualists, such as Dmitrii Prigov, and the ‘protopostmodernist’ early texts of Viktor Pelevin.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a paradoxical feature in post-Soviet Russian literature and film, where an anti-imperial message coexists with colonial tropes. It focuses on two short stories: “Slabye kosti” (“Weak Bones,” 1988) by Liudmila Petrushevskaia and “Kavkazskii plennyi” (“Prisoner of the Caucasus,” 1995) by Vladimir Makanin. Set respectively in Central Asia and the Caucasus, these stories reflect on the troubled Russian and Soviet relationship with these regions. Despite their artistic complexity and anti-imperial messages, these works are trapped by the literary tropes and cultural stereotypes of the past. These stories relate to a broader cultural trend characteristic of post-Soviet Russian culture. On the one hand, Russian culture has remained unreceptive to post-colonial discourses adopted by Western intellectuals. On the other hand, the resurgence of imperial preoccupations in contemporary Russia, as well as the anxiety surrounding Russia’s territorial integrity, preclude the development of Russia’s own discourses on ethnically distinct peripheries and identities. As a result of this discursive silence, even nuanced writers, such as Makanin and Petrushevskaia, rely on the traditional models of representing the Caucasus and Central Asia.

2015

The Slavic and East European Journal, 2001