北海道大学スラブ・ユーラシア研究センターは、本会会員の小椋彩氏が代表の研究プロジェクト「ロシア・中東欧のエコクリティシズム：スラヴ文学と環境問題の諸相」（基盤研究(B)、課題番号21H00518）と共催で、以下のセミナーを予定しております。

報告者：Dr. Maria Hristova (Lewis and Clark College, USA)

題目：Re-accessing Soviet Legacies: Post Soviet Depictions of the

Semipalatinsk Nuclear Tests

日時：2021年5月27日（木）、16時30分-15時30分

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詳細は次のリンクをご覧ください。https://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/jp/seminors/src/2021.html

発表の概略は以下の通りです。

The Soviet legacy in a post-Soviet world is both an ambiguous and ambivalent symbol of the past, particularly when discussing environmental issues. Large scale agrarian projects, plant failures, and nuclear testing, among other state undertakings, have caused immeasurable devastation in places such as Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Located on the periphery of Soviet power, at present, these places often interpret the Soviet experience as a type of colonization. However, critiquing the past is turning out to be a challenging task. Despite the Chernobyl tragedy and what it eventually revealed about the larger Soviet tendency of mismanaging the energy production process, not much has fundamentally changed in how post-Soviet nations exploit and benefit from their natural resources and the Soviet-era industrial set up.

This talk examines how contemporary writers and filmmakers, both in Russia and in Central Asia, respond to these Soviet legacies of ecological disasters. Specifically, I focus on how representing nuclear pollution and its effects on humans and the environment relates to (re)assessing the Soviet past. I approach these issues through a comparative framework, using three Russian-language case studies from the post-2000 period: Uzbek writer, Hamid Ismailov’s, novella “The Dead Lake” (2011), Kazakh director, Satybaldy Narimbetov’s, film Leila’s Prayer (2002), and Russian director, Aleksander Kott’s, film The Test (2014). All three works imagine and interpret the same historical moment: the nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk site, or the “Polygon,” in the 1950s and 1960s and its effects on the surrounding nature and nearby human habitations. Each work, however, presents a unique view of these events and a different approach in their representation. In my analysis I engage with the work of environmental theorists, such as Felix Guattari, Stacy Alaimo, and Vladimir Kagansky, in order to better understand how contemporary Russian-language cultural producers use narratives of nuclear pollution as a means of re-thinking and re-formulating their relationship to mainstream ideas about the meaning of national and ethnic identities.