Issue 1/2026

Forum “The Prospect of Studying World Russian Languages, Literatures, and Histories: Part IV”

Forum “The Prospect of Studying World Russian Languages, Literatures, and Histories: Part IV”

Forum “The Prospect of Studying World Russian Languages, Literatures, and Histories: Part IV”

Forum “Formalism: Rusian or Russian?”

Forum “Formalism: Rusian or Russian?”

Forum “Formalism: Rusian or Russian?”

Forum “The Power of Soft Matter”

Forum “The Power of Soft Matter”

Forum “The Power of Soft Matter”

Ab Imperio

Ab Imperio

Issue 1/2026

Issue 1/2026

Methodology and Theory

Hard Times Create Strong Women: Transgressing Methodological Nationalism and Identity Politics

Responding to Russophonia: Toward a Planetary Approach

On Vernacular English, or Where Language Lives

Making the Hegemonic Language Vernacular

History

Decentering or Recentering? On the Postimperial History of Russian Formalism

Rewriting Abai Kunanbaiev: Shklovsky, Translation, and Building Kazakh Soviet Literature

Decentering Europe from the Caucasus: Nikolai Marr and the Problem of Mapping Cultural Theory

The Ruin as Foundation: An Archaeology of Synthesizing New Universalist Knowledge in a Postimperial Context

Archive

Feliks Iakubovs’kyi on Viktor Shklovsky’s Ukrainian Subtext

“Khokhlology” as a Form of Illiteracy

“Khokhlology” as a Form of Illiteracy (Ukrainian original)

Newest Mythologies

(Im)potentialities of Weakness: Introduction to the Discussion of Julia Vaingurt’s “Soft Matter”

Soft Matter, Soft Power

Weak Subjectivity: Potencies and Failings

Cult of the Will and Its Discontents: A Moral Genealogy of Late Soviet Poetics of Weakness

Book Reviews

Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024). 318 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5036-3670-5.

Kerstin S. Jobst, Oksana Nagornaia, and Kerstin von Lingen (Eds.), The Great War and the Anthropocene: Empire and Environment, Soldiers and Civilians on the Eastern Front (Leiden: Brill, 2024). 391 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-90-04-71011-5.

Alistair S. Wright, Revolution and Civil War in North Russia: Karelia and the Murmansk Region, 1917–1920 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). 237 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-3504-3401-1.

List of Contributors

Our Authors

Ukrainian Formalism and Russophonia as Methods? Some Preliminary Observations, Proposals, and Doubts Regarding Possible Intersections

Notes About Weakness

The Unpredictable Queerness of Soft Matter

More Modest Than All the Rest: Julia Vaingurt, “Soft Matter”

Structures of Weakness: Julia Vaingurt’s “Soft Matter”

Response to the Forum

Matthias Schwartz and Nina Weller (Eds.), Appropriating History: The Soviet Past in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Popular Culture (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2024). 316 pp., ill. ISBN: 978-3-8376-6077-7.

Marianne Kamp, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024). 285 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-7799-8.

Pietro A. Shakarian, Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025). 350 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-253-07354-9.

Birgit Beumers, Catherine Géry, and Eugénie Zvonkine (Eds.), Sexuality, Nudity and the Body in Soviet Cinema (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025). 254 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-1-032-61532-5.

Ian Garner and Taras Kuzio (Eds.), Russia and Modern Fascism: New Perspectives on the Kremlin’s War Against Ukraine (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2025). 350 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8382-2015-4.

Kevin M. Schultz, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025). 279 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-226-82436-9.