Fractured Truths: Nostalgia in Post-Soviet Russophone Literature

This essay explores the phenomenon of nostalgia in post-Soviet literature, examining how Russophone authors navigate the complex creative terrain between reality and illusion, fiction and history, utopia and dystopia. As we explore the theme, we attempt to address the question of: why some authors resort to nostalgia in their writing; how nostalgia is expressed by their protagonists, and, if ‘looking back’ is a tool for the artistic deconstruction of history, which past and present the authors critique? Our brief survey of Russophone writers from Kazakhstan, Dagestan and Tatarstan is by no means exhaustive; however, it is our hope that this discussion will stimulate further exploration into the intricate relationship between creative writing and memory in the post-Soviet literary universe. 

The collapse of the USSR left the literature of the former republics in a perplexing state. While it introduced new characteristics into post-Soviet creative writing, it has paradoxically been drawing its inspiration from a familiar past. In terms of genre and structure, unlike the highly formulaic Socialist Realist literature, this new era is marked by a sense of suspicion towards anything finite: novel canons have emerged, new themes have been explored, unique protagonists have been brought to life.¹ 1 For ‘imperial practice’ in Socialist Realism, see Evgeny Dobrenko and Klavdia Smola, “Introduction,” Slavic Review, vol. 81, no. 4 (2022): 865–68. For the conventions (and exceptions) of Socialist Realist writing, see Slavic Review, vol. 81, no. 4 (2022) and Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, University of Chicago Press, 1981 (RUS: Кларк, Катерина. Советский роман: История как ритуал, перевод Марии Литовской, USлавистика: Издательство Уральского Университета, 2002. ISBN: 5-7525-1027-9, 5-7525-1091-0). As scholars of literary studies suggest, “it is a curious fact” that the era extending from the early 1990s to the present still lacks a singular term that encapsulates its cultural essence. By the start of the period of independence, Russophone literary landscapes saw the rise of new genres like women's prose and queer literature, exploring alternative expressions of artistic subjectivity. Yet, while perestroika concluded the Party's seventy-year-long rule, “even after the death of its ideology and economic system,” connections to the former empire's legacy continue to hold significance in post-Soviet writing.² 2 Mark Lipovetsky and Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader (Academic Studies Press, 2014), 14-15.  

One internationally-acclaimed exploration of the USSR’s legacy is Secondhand Time (2013). In the book, Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich unveils a “fresco of Soviet utopia” crafted through a collection of interviews with its ordinary citizens — its ‘protagonists,’ ‘witnesses,’ and both ‘victims and victimisers.’³ 3 Jorge Ferrer, “A Date with Svetlana Alexievich in Berlin or, Smuggling Bugs into Soviet Moscow,” World Literature Today vol. 93, issue 4 (Autumn 2019): 32. Traversing the Soviet map between Belarus and Kazakhstan and spanning the 1950s to 2010s, these voices reflect on the Soviet collapse. Unified by the catch-all Homo sovieticus, a term borrowed from Alexander Zinoviev’s 1982 homonymous work on uncritical conformity among Soviet citizens, Alexievich’s polyphony complicates this pejorative and simplistic notion.⁴ 4 Александр Зиновьев, Гомо советикус (L’Age d’Homme: Lausanne), 1982. For more information on the critique of ‘homo sovieticus,’ see Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s book, The Afterlife of the Soviet Man (Bloomsbury Press, 2023).  The end of the USSR reveals a collective awakening to the fact that the beliefs people once embraced had become ‘passé,’ or, as the author puts it, ‘second-hand.’⁵ 5 Marja Sorvari, Displacement and (Post)memory in Post-Soviet Women’s Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 100.

Secondhand Time interrogates recollections of the recent past that remain so vivid that they disrupt and reinvent the present. Alexievich bridges the challenges of memory and identity amidst the Soviet collapse, or what Dobrenko and Shcherbenok (2011) call "a palpable traumatic void, which its subjects fill with their incoherent, emotional, and ideologically charged interventions."⁶ 6 Evgeny Dobrenko and Andrey Shcherbenok, "Introduction Between History and the Past: The Soviet Legacy as a Traumatic Object of Contemporary Russian Culture," Slavonica 17.2 (2011): 77. The severe economic downturn of the early 1990s spurred nostalgia for the Soviet era, a sentiment that persisted into the 2000s despite improved living conditions.⁷ 7 Lipovetsky and Wakamiya, 13.   The newly independent states’ varying approaches to addressing the legacies of the USSR, neo-colonial ties to the former imperial core, and the painful integration into the new capitalist dominance of the West have found reflection in creative writing. Consequently, Alexievich’s protagonists, often unable to confront the post-1991 present, end up ‘looking back,’ using nostalgia for the Soviet past – real or imaginary – as a vantage point to articulate the post-Soviet literary protagonist’s subjectivity. 

This nostalgia, as decolonial scholars warn us, can easily morph into “dangerous postimperial ressentiment⁸ 8 Madina Tlostanova, What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?: Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 10. .”⁸ 8 Madina Tlostanova, What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?: Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 10. For instance, authors like Aleksandr Prokhanov and Eduard Limonov promote "nostalgic [and openly] nationalist ideologies."¹⁰ 10 Lipovetsky, Late and Post-Soviet Literature, 16. These writers from the former imperial metropole depict Soviet hegemony as the product of a benevolent occupant or coloniser counterbalancing the West and promote neo-conservative literary protagonists centred on Russia.¹¹ 11 Ilya Kukulin, "Cultural Shifts in Russia Since 2010: Messianic Cynicism and Paradigms of Artistic Resistance," Russian Literature 96 (2018): 221-254.Madina Tlostanova, What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?, 13. As Tlostanova identifies, the same nationalist rhetoric transcends the abstract artistic forms of expression and manifests itself in the real-life neo-imperial Russian violence, as seen in Syria, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the two Chechen wars, the war in Georgia, and the recent full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. This perspective, however, glosses over the USSR’s internal colonial disparities, or – as Madina Tlostanova (2018) defines it – "the darker side of (post-)Soviet modernity marked by Orientalism, racism, othering, and forced assimilation." After all, in what was once the ‘affirmative action empire,’ Soviet “progressivism meant one thing for Russians and something else for Uzbeks and Georgians.” ¹² 12 For ‘affirmative action empire,’ see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Cornell University Press, 2001). For hierarchies within Soviet ‘progressivism,’ see Madina Tlostanova, What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet?, 10.

Writers from the former national republics resort to nostalgia in their works, too. But how does their ‘peripheral’ position within the USSR’s ethnic system shape their post-Soviet literary characters? Tamar Koplatadze (2019), for instance, argues that such protagonists experience metaphorical ‘homelessness,’ caught between ambivalence toward their former coloniser and their own identity. This feeling, compounded by their status – “not ‘advanced’ enough” for Europe and “not underdeveloped enough to qualify as the ‘Third World’” – in the global capitalist hierarchy, leaves them vacillating between past and present.¹³ 13 Tamar Koplatadze, "Theorising Russian Postcolonial Studies," Postcolonial Studies 22.4 (2019): 483. Nostalgia, rooted in the impossibility of return and discomfort with the former ‘home,’ becomes a tool for a literary reconstruction or deconstruction of the Soviet past. 

In the novella Man Without a Name / Человек без имени (2006) by Kazakhstani writer Nikolai Verevochkin, the literal homelessness of the protagonist known as Bomzh – a demeaning Russian-language acronym for a person without a fixed abode – is juxtaposed with the above-mentioned metaphorical homelessness that characterises the post-Soviet condition. Much like the post-Soviet subject, Bomzh is relegated to the margins of history in the city of Nenuzhensk, a place of no real significance, or, as we might perhaps call it, ‘the dumpster of history’. His existence is marked by “a sense of the impossibility of return to an ostensibly happier past state.”¹⁴ 14 Kevin M.F. Platt, “After Nostalgia: A Backward Glance at a Backward Glance,” in Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies, ed. Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos and Ksenia Robbe (Routledge 2019), 229. As Bomzh himself reflects: 

Verevochkin’s unnamed protagonist exemplifies the struggle to process, grieve, and confront the event of trauma — in this case, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Far from offering comfort, nostalgia warps his memories, transforming them into distorted visions of the past that eventually resurface as grotesque, haunting nightmares. As Dmirtiy Melnikov (2023) notes, the story’s dream sequences expose the protagonist’s fractured consciousness and disrupt the narrative’s logical flow in a way that mirrors nostalgia’s challenges to historical accuracy.¹⁶ 16 Дмитрий Мельников, «К пост-/деколониальному воображению» in Qazaqstan.Казахстан, قازاقستان: лабиринты современного постколониального дискурса, ред. Алима Бисенова (Целинный, 2023), 150. Yet Verevochkin often moves beyond abstract portrayals of trauma, anchoring Bomzh’s suffering in the physical realities of his life within the capitalist biopolitics of the post-Soviet city. Set against a backdrop of self-made city businessmen, shiny black Mercedes cars, rampant privatisation, and elitist medical institutions, Bomzh’s body itself becomes a site of pain. “Curled up in the fetal position at the bottom of [a local city] well,” he finds himself composed of “small and larger bones, old, poorly healed, and fresh, aching wounds, dislocations, bruises, and sprains.”¹⁷ 17 «Свернувшись в позе зародыша на дне колодца, человек ощущал себя космонавтом в переходной камере»; «он сплошь состоял из маленьких и больших костей, старых, плохо заживших, и свежих, саднящих ран, вывихов, ушибов, растяжений»,Николай Веревочкин, «Человек без имени», Дружба Народов no. 11 (2006): N/A. Bomzh’s plight thus reflects not only the intangible trauma of Soviet disintegration but also the material hardships of his post-Soviet existence, trapping him in a cycle of nostalgic self-submergence beyond escape. 

Bomzh embodies both the most marginalized communities of post-Soviet urban spaces and, at the same time, serves as a kind of ‘everyman,’ representing the jump from Soviet collapse to modern-day post-Sovietcapitalist city — a grotesque illustration of Alexievich’s ‘second-hand’ generation. If Verevochkin’s Bomzh is confined in the city, Dagestani writer Alisa Ganieva rewrites the geography of an entire country. Ganieva’s novel The Mountain and the Wall / Празднична гора (2012) contemplates a hypothetical dystopian scenario where the Caucasus is separated from Russia by a wall. Akin to Verevochkin’s novella, the text reflects the traumatic state of the post-Soviet literary protagonist, which is symbolically fragmented. First, the traditional way of life in Dagestan, rooted in folk myths and legends, is intertwined with Western cultures introduced to the region after the USSR's collapse. At the same time, the embedded Socialist Realist novel titled “Rye Does Not Grow on Stone” (Рожь не растёт на камне) draws us back to the Soviet era. Finally, fundamentalist religious forces, resisting modernity, envision a future reminiscent more of the Middle Ages. These postmodernist elements result in farcical combinations that reflect the instability of nostalgic longing.

For Ganieva, these forms of signification stemming from hegemonic institutions are, in fact, similarly ‘empty.’ For instance, Makhmud Tagirovich, a character depicted as a famous Dagestani author in the novel, pens a family saga. We find his final moments of writing in the following episode:

Makhmud Tagirovich’s substitution of the Soviet-sounding phrase ‘Дагестан’ ‘природой дан’ with a religious expression invites us to see these slogans as flexible tools, performative symbols wielded by the author for practical effect. This playful interchange reveals the lack of any true connection between the signifier and the signified, suggesting that the shift in language does not really alter the underlying meaning. As a result, we come to understand any hegemonic discourse as an empty shell, readily reused and reinvented in accordance with new realities.

Similarly, the integration of the post-Soviet space into a capitalist system generates a simulacra of ‘exotic’ traditions. This theme is embodied in the novel’s protagonist, Shamil, a journalist who comes to a Kubachi village to write an article on traditional crafts and discovers that artisans who “once crafted authentic, functional weapons now [mass produce] souvenirs.” Here, culture becomes a mere representation of itself, a marketable shell devoid of substance. This theme of cultural commodification is further emphasised in a different episode, where Shamil goes through papers on his desk and finds leaflets arranged in a farcical combination: “One brochure was entitled The Meanings of the Koran; another The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation; a third The Art of the Pick Up²⁰ 20 Alisa Ganieva, The Mountain and the Wall, trans. Carol Apollonio (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015), ePub. In the original (in Ганиева, Праздничная гора, ePub): “Первая – Смыслы Корана, вторая – Уголовный кодекс Российской Федерации, третья – Правила пикапа.” .” Through the character of Shamil and others, Ganieva’s novel reveals that any attempt to impose a homogenised post-Soviet reality – whether through a revival of the Soviet ‘utopian’ model, religious extremism, or a turn to neoliberalism – inevitably leads to chaos and social exclusion, threatening the existing heterogeneity of Dagestan’s population and the Caucasus more broadly. In Ganieva’s text, nostalgia is linked to violence and oppression.²¹ 21 We encourage readers to compare Ganieva’s novel with German Sadulaev’s I am a Chechen! / Я – чеченец! (2006) and explore how his use of nostalgia for Soviet Internationalism shapes his portrayal of the 1990s Caucasus.  

While Verevochkin and Ganieva offer a more or less straightforward critique of Soviet nostalgia, Tatarstan-born Russophone author Guzel Yakhina weaves a veiled longing for the past. In her 2015 historical novel Zuleikha / Зулейха открывает глаза,Yakhina revisits a seemingly typical Soviet tale of the emancipation of an Oriental woman. Set against the backdrop of dekulakisation, mass deportation and life in a Stalin-era labour camp, the novel paradoxically cloaks imperial discourse as ‘anti-imperial’: the negative realities of colonial oppression and self-orientalising narratives are reframed as a triumph of ‘Eastern’ women’s liberation and personal heroism. 

Zuleikha’s journey begins in a ‘traditional’ Tatar village, where she endures the harshness of indigenous patriarchal structures — physical and emotional abuse from her husband, Murtaza, and her mother-in-law. Her ‘liberation’ arrives in the form of Red Army officer Ignatov, who kills her husband and forcibly takes Zuleikha to a labour camp. As the narrative progresses, she is stripped of her cultural roots and rapidly reformed:

She learns Russian, becomes a mother, and develops into a productive worker, fulfilling the ideal of the ‘Eastern’ woman transformed into the New Soviet Woman. Yet, as we come to realise, her so-called liberation is merely nominal and offers no real agency, while the place that grotesquely marks the beginning of her ‘freedom’ is, in fact, a labour camp.  

Zuleikha is not alone in viewing the camp through a linear, simplistic lens. Ignatov’s change from a fierce revolutionary follows a similar trajectory. He becomes disillusioned as he confronts the bureaucratic machinery of the Soviet regime. Here too, the camp – a microcosm of Soviet society – ironically reshapes him into a positive figure, a paternal presence for Zuleikha’s son, Yuzuf. This is how the camp prisoners describe him:

Yuzuf, born in the camp, assimilates into Soviet culture, growing distant from Tatar traditions and folklore, which he perceives as alien and irrelevant:

In this context, Ignatov symbolically replaces Murtaza, granting Yuzuf a new identity — the name of Iosif Ignatov, enabling him to have a life outside the camp. As we see, this conceptual substitution, where negative experiences are presented as positive, obscures historical accuracy and constructs a nostalgic, idyllic vision of the Soviet past from the perspective of the former ‘periphery.’ 

This brief survey of Russophone writers illuminates how nostalgia shapes post-Soviet literary protagonists. From Verevochkin’s melancholic everyman, whose nostalgia traps him in a cycle of nightmares, to Yakhina’s grotesque revision of the multiethnic USSR, these narratives expose the many ways post-Soviet authors contend with the loss of a stable, albeit illusory, Soviet identity within the larger context of the post-Soviet capitalist landscape. Yet, many questions remain. How has Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine reshaped nostalgia in the literature of the post-Soviet republics? How does the Russian language itself complicate our understanding of post-1991 writing? What roles do generational differences, gender and class play in these stories? We invite readers to dive deeper into these questions and approach nostalgia in Russophone literature with an even sharper critical eye.