Global Perestroika and Soviet Literatures

Conference and Subsequent Edited Volume
University of Dresden, March 18–21, 2027

Organizers:
Klavdia Smola (Technology University of Dresden)
Naomi Caffee (Reed College)
Zachary Hicks (UC Berkeley)

In recent years, Soviet and East European literary history has taken a turn towards the global. New paradigms of transnational and world literature, along with postcolonial and decolonial approaches, have radically reconfigured the field. Although the Cold War era has so far been the primary focus of scholarship on this topic, increasing attention is now being paid to perestroika and the immediate post-Soviet transition period—particularly the active involvement of writers and “national intelligentsia” in shaping political imaginaries, solidarities, and long-term ideological developments during periods of political and economic transformation. 

This conference proposes to rethink the years 1985–1991 not as a brief moment of reform and collapse, but as part of an extended period with origins in the post-Stalin era and consequences extending into the present. Late Soviet and post-Soviet literatures offer a vantage point for examining shifting forms of globality between the 1950s and the 1990s, as well as critical reevaluation of Socialist alliances and the constructs of First, Second, and Third Worlds. Ultimately this conference poses a challenge to the defining narrative of this era: rather than giving way to a singular Western global order, Soviet globality was reshaped through shifting coalitions, competing solidarities, and emerging ideological fault lines.

During this period, Soviet literatures entered a new phase of global visibility. Writers traveled, participated in international forums, and imagined new forms of literary networking. These movements generated new alliances and conflicts—often around environmental and decolonial agendas—as well as new literary texts, genres, and poetics. In addition to poetry and fiction, the genres of travel writing, autobiography, essays, and hybrid documentary forms became key sites for negotiating linguistic and cultural imperialism, global inequality, and the writer’s position between geopolitical blocs.

These developments also transformed relations between national literary languages and Russian as a Soviet lingua franca. Practices of bilingual writing and self-translation complicate established models of world literature and call for closer attention to multilingual mediation and asymmetrical circulation, while challenging notions of the “universal” and the “local.” This conference positions literature as simultaneously a medium of global participation, a laboratory of aesthetic experimentation, and a site of ideological negotiation.

An additional key focus of this conference is the expanded political agency of writers during perestroika and its aftermath. Many authors moved between literature and state politics, grassroots activism, and transnational advocacy, often drawing on the ethical frameworks and institutional legacies of Soviet multinational literature. At the same time, engagement with political agendas offered writers ways of inhabiting new forms of globality without fully embracing Western value systems. Ecological discourse and Indigenous activism, in particular, allowed (post-)Soviet authors to translate Soviet anti-imperial vocabularies into broader transnational frameworks. At the same time, new connections were also marked by cultural (mis)interpretations, partial solidarities, ideological asymmetries and unresolved tensions surrounding democracy, gender, and political power. 

Finally, the conference addresses the long-term cultural and political consequences of perestroika. Since the 2000s, Soviet multinational literary legacies have been reactivated in nationalist and broader Eurasianist, pan-Turkic, pan-Asian, and pan-Arctic projects, as well as in contemporary right-wing populist and “new Cold War” discourses. These developments call for renewed critical attention to the ways late Soviet literary practices continue to inform present-day ideologies. Beyond narratives of failed democratic transition, perestroika gave rise to new currents of cultural expression and geopolitical imagination, alongside new forms of political belonging and exclusion. 

We invite contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes and approaches:

• Terminologies of globality as negotiated in literature (e.g. First/Second/Third/Fourth World; Global North/South; pan-Turkic/-Asian/-Arctic, … worlds) and their implications

• The concept of the “long perestroika” in literary and cultural history

• Travel, mobility, and global literary networks

• New literary genres and poetics during perestroika and the 1990s

• Multilingualism, bilingual writing, and self-translation

• Literary negotiations between Socialist internationalism and Western or non-Communist global orders

• Politics through literature: writers as state or grassroots political actors

• Literary renegotiations of colonial discourses in dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial theory

• Literature and the political afterlives of perestroika

• Canonization, cultural memory, and the geopolitical uses of Soviet literary legacies in the twenty-first century

Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of approximately 300–400 words and a short CV by March 31, 2026.

Please send submissions to the following email address: globalperestroika.project@protonmail.com 

Selected contributions will be presented at the conference and considered for inclusion in the subsequent edited volume.