Public lecture: “The Memory Boom: A View from Russia” by Alexander Etkind

A public lecture “The Memory Boom: A View from Russia” by Alexander Etkind from University of Cambridge and European University Institute, Florence in Tallinn University on 18 October at 10 a.m. in room M-134.

While Europeans are talking about “the obsession with the past around the globe”, Russians complain about the historical amnesia in their country. In this talk, I will demonstrate the limits of both positions. In the land where many millions were unlawfully murdered during the Soviet period, the cultural practices of memory are inadequate to these losses. However, the Soviet past haunts Russia’s public sphere; its struggling civil society, the intrepid reading public, and rapidly developing Internet are possessed by the unquiet ghosts of the Stalinist era. Obsessed by the unburied past, post-Soviet culture has produced perverse memorial practices that are worthy of detailed exploration. Understanding it requires more sophisticated concepts than ‘amnesia’ or ‘nostalgia’, and these concepts come from psychoanalytic theory and the Holocaust Memory Studies. 

Alexander Etkind is Professor of Russian Literature and Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Mikhail M. Bakhtin Chair in Russia-Europe Relations at the European University Institute at Florence. His research interests include internal colonization in the Russian Empire, comparative studies of cultural memory, and the dynamics of the protest movement in Russia. His most recent book Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press, 2013) deals with remembering Stalinist crimes in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

The public lectures are part of the intensive seminar “Holocaust Memory and the Soviet Past: Transitional Remembering in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe” (Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University; Estonian Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts; Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of Estonian Academy of Sciences).