Russo-Soviet Imperialist Hauntings : Neo-Gothic Geographies in Central and Eastern Europe Since 1989.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Krys, Svitlana.

Contributor:

Krys

Series:

International Gothic Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Postcolonialism in literature.

Gothic fiction (Literary genre).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (429 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2026.

Summary:

Russo-Soviet imperialist hauntings conceptualizes neo-Gothic texts from the former Eastern Bloc countries and Soviet republics in postcolonial terms. It maps virtually untouched aspects of cultural decolonization, focusing on the uncanny return of repressed and unsettling "hauntings" of unresolved memory traces of Russo-Soviet domination.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright information

Dedication

Contents

Contributors

Series editors' preface

Preface

Notes

Acknowledgements

Note on translation and transliteration

Introduction to Russo-Soviet imperialist hauntings

Foundational violence: specters of empire

In pursuit of ghosts

Pervasive ghostliness

Self-designated postcolonial doppelgängers

Undead imperial Gothic

Nostalgia or obsessive perversion?

Neo-Gothic geographies

Part I: Art, performance, and film

Chapter 1: The ghosts of the Soviet past in Natalka Vorozhbyt's Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha

A Gogolian ghost

Comic Gothic as a mask and a shield

The Soviet gender order: feminine home vs. masculine war

Traumatic comic Gothic

Coda: Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha after February 24, 2022

Chapter 2: Refusing to die: neo-Gothic political fiction and post-Yugoslav cultural production

Why Aren't You Here? Where is here?

The Gothic imaginary and historical vampirism

Der Spuk of Balkan

Neo-Gothic political fiction

Chapter 3: Post-Soviet apocalypse in Gothic fiction and Gothic politics

The Gothic Apocalypse, the death turn and neomedievalism

The Blackout: the Kremlin Gothic Apocalypse

The Orthodox apocalypse and doomsday politics

Part II: Gender, identity, and sexuality

Chapter 4: Haunted in desolation: queering the post-Soviet Latvian Gothic

Liepa's transgressive and abject bodies

Sakss's narcissistic and monstrous bodies

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Sophia Andrukhovych's Felix Austria: the postcolonial neo-Gothic and Ukraine's search for itself

Chapter 6: Feminism as a Gothic "thoughtcrime": contextualizing Alma by Izabela Filipiak.

Izabela Filipiak and the Polish literary canon

Alma and the Gothic tradition

Gothic thoughtcrime from the times of communism

A female monster and her antecedents

Infinite texts, mutable bodies

Confronting the biblical legacy under patriarchy

Intertextual metamorphoses

Refiguring mother and daughter

Anti/Madonna

In dialogue with Hesse

Part III: Spectral geographies, borderland, diaspora

Chapter 7: The Eastern European monster reclaimed: finding a voice in a postsocialist, postcolonial world

The background

The neo-Gothic vampire

The Eastern European intellectual

The postcolonial, postsocialist zombie

The intellectual vampire, the anti-intellectual zombie

Chapter 8: Andriy Lyubka's Carbide: Ukrainian democratic reforms through a dark glass

Carbide's Gotho-carnivalesque aesthetics

Two layers of abjection in Carbide

Ukraine's colonial past as an obstacle to reforms in Carbide

The legacy of the Enlightenment in Carbide

Chapter 9: The madwoman on the farm: witches in Ukrainian Canadian literature

Part IV: (Post)communism, totalitarianism, historical trauma

Chapter 10: Spectrality, necropolitics, and Gothic topography of the city in Nikolai Grozni's Wunderkind

Spectral topography of the city: spaces of indoctrination and confinement

School II: "a ghost is haunting Europe, the ghost of communism"

School III: "during the reign of the red midgets"

Mental hospital: "You are looking at my corpse"

Forced labor camp: "the secret world of ghosts"

Guardians of empire: "imprisoned in counterfeit reality"

In conclusion: "I picked up a few tomes of Scientific Communism parts I and II lying on the ground and threw them into the flames"

Notes.

Chapter 11: Institutional Gothic in the novels of Vladimir Sharov and Evgenii Vodolazkin

Gothic predecessors: British fictional edifices

Vladimir Sharov: the Gothic asylum

Evgenii Vodolazkin: the Gothic clinic

Other Gothic tropes

Chapter 12: The tomb of the reluctant tyrant: uncanny imaginings of totalitarianism in Ismail Kadare's The Pyramid

Exploring the method

The pyramid, the pharaoh, and the people: uncanny beginnings, or is there a secret in this pyramid?

The pyramid and the pharaoh: dust of sad (and mad) kings

The pyramid tradition: continuators and avatars

A conclusion of a transparent kind

Editors' postscript: Cradle

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Part of the metadata in this record was created by AI, based on the text of the resource.

ISBN:

1-5261-9101-6

1-5261-9102-4

OCLC:

1592691390