Victoria Buyanovskaya

Area(s) of Study: early Soviet culture, literary and political theory, post-Soviet literature

About: Victoria earned her BA and MA in Russian and Comparative Literature from the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (Moscow, Russia). Her current research revolves around the literary and political imagination of the grassroots democratic alternatives to the early Soviet centralism. She studies how these regional utopias were modeled through literature, in particular working-class and peasant writing (in Russian and Ukrainian). Her dissertation is dedicated to several local anti-Bolshevik insurgencies of the early 1920s, namely the Kronstadt Commune, the Makhno movement, and the West Siberian uprising. Victoria’s research interests also include Polish modernism, Soviet Jewish literature, and the intersection between biopolitics and memory culture, particularly in the late Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. Victoria also loves sharing her passion for literature and language through teaching.

Education:

National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (Moscow, Russia) – BA and MA in Russian and Comparative Literature

University of Wisconsin-Madison, MA in Slavic Studies

Courses Taught:

-First Semester Russian (Fall 2022)

-Fourth Semester Russian (Spring 2023)

-Survey of 19th Century Russian Literature (Fall 2024)

-Survey of 20th Century Russian Literature (Spring 2024)

Awards:

2022 Cultural Studies Grand Prize in NYU Jordan Center Blog Graduate Student Essay Competition (“Paralysis of Complicity in Dmitri Prigov and Beyond: How to Do Things With Metaphors Now?”)

J. Thomas Shaw Prize for outstanding paper at Wisconsin Slavic Conference- Honorable Mention (2023)

Publications:

“Turning Back Time to Keep Writing: Melancholic Memory and the Making of the Modern(ist) Self in Bruno Schulz’s ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.’” The Polish Review (2023) 68 (3): 3-22

Review of Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory), by Ainsley Morse. SEEJ 65, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 565-566.

“Revolution vs. Pedagogy: Arkady Gaidar and the Making of Soviet Children’s Literature.” NYU Jordan Center Blog. https://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/revolution-vs-pedagogy-arkady-gaidar-and-the-making-of-soviet-childrens-literature/#.YyFppuzMJQI

“Paralysis of Complicity in Dmitri Prigov and Beyond: How to Do Things With Metaphors Now?” NYU Jordan Center Blog. https://jordanrussiacenter.org/blog/paralysis-of-complicity-in-dmitri-prigov-and-beyond-how-to-do-things-with-metaphors-now