Slavic and East European Journal

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Slavic and East European Journal

Original research and review essays in the areas of Slavic and East European languages, literatures, cultures, linguistics, and methodology & pedagogy.

The Slavic and East European Journal serves the Slavic profession by publishing original research and review essays in the areas of Slavic and East European languages, literatures, cultures, linguistics, and methodology/ pedagogy as well as reviews of books published in these areas. The journal is published quarterly by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL).

04/17/2026

In her article "Heretical Identities: Gender, Selfhood, and Power in Zamiatin's 'We,'" Kelly Gallagher (Ohio State University) argues that gender is one of the main vehicles for challenging the dystopian One State in Evgenii Zamiatin’s 1924 novel "We." Gallagher reinterprets O-90’s desire for a baby as a radical act of resistance against the State that tries to control her body. The article demonstrates how I-330 utilizes gender as a performance meant to provide an alternative to the One State’s gender ideology. Gallagher examines how D-503 discovers his individuality and political agency through his evolving experience of gender, expressed through his sexual relationship with I-330 and becoming a metaphorical mother to his text–a journey that parallels O-90’s.

Find the complete abstract for "Heretical Identities: Gender, Selfhood, and Power in Zamiatin's 'We'" and the table of contents for our Winter 2025 issue on our website!

04/09/2026

In SEEJ 69.4, Byungsam Jung (Syracuse University) examines
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s narrative strategy using the term “literary ventriloquism”—a rhetorical technique that involves a dialogue between deviant and conventional narration and an ostensible fight for supremacy in narration. Jung contends that the distinctive forms of heteroglossia found in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel "The History of a Town" can trace its origin back to his early romantic passion, to its “literary ventriloquism.” This technique of framing and employing fantastical storytelling elements while remaining in the realist convention allows Saltykov- Shchedrin to bridge the seemingly disparate epistemological concerns of Russian romanticism and Russian realism.

Find the complete abstract for "Literary Ventriloquism: A Dialogue Between Framing and Framed Narrative in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The History of A Town" on our website!I

04/02/2026

In SEEJ 69.4, Gabriel Nussbaum (Princeton University) write that Leo Tolstoy’s early diaries have long been understood to be a staging ground for the style of his earliest fictional works, but these journals also gradually acquire a discrete form of their own. Nussbaum traces this diaristic style’s evolution over the course of the 1850s, and argues that one of its major motivations is Tolstoy’s attempt to textually represent his quotidian, bodily sensations. His earliest diaries meticulously record instances of illness, sexual desire, and semi-conscious impressions in a frustrated attempt to analyze and regulate his body; as this continues to fail, his diaristic style acquires a more terse, immediate style that better captures the incomprehensibility of bodily sensation.

Find the complete abstract for "Remembrance as Physiological Style in Early Tolstoy" on our website.

03/25/2026

In our winter issue, Jiyoung Hong (Yonsei University) analyzes the first Russian Gothic fiction, Nikolai Karamzin's “The Island of Bornholm” (1793). Karamzin associated Gothic characters’ visual perception with that of the audience in the shadow play, specifically the “Chinese shadow,” as well as that of prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Hong investigates the way in which Karamzin reshapes Plato’s cave with Gothic trappings after his visual experience of Chinese Shadows, a popular shadow puppet theater in Paris, and claims that Karamzin poses an epistemological question as to the truthfulness of our perception by using the interplay of light and darkness of Gothic aesthetics, thus creating tension between the known and the unknown.

Find the complete abstract for "Gothic Shadow Play in Plato's Cave: Nikolai Karamzin's 'The Island of Bornholm'" on our website!

03/18/2026

In our winter issue, Dmitry Arzyutov and Laura Siragusa (The Ohio State University) challenge the idea that Arctic/Siberian Indigenous literacy history began with the “introduction” of alphabetic writing by Russian missionaries and Soviet modernizers. They analyze the cultures of non-alphabetic writing—specifically, the ideographic and pictographic signs and texts historically and contemporarily prevalent among Indigenous communities across Siberia and the Arctic. Their article focuses particularly on the writing practices of Nenets, an Indigenous Samoyedic group in northern Eurasia, examining their use of signs, drawings, and various text forms. Reflecting on this history, they demonstrate how these practices are “trans-indigenous,” in Chadwick Allen’s terms, and how they have resisted various forms of colonial dominance while continuing to manifest in Indigenous everyday life. The paper is based on the authors’ analysis of Indigenous novels, archival, and field materials.

Find the complete table of contents and abstracts for SEEJ 69.4 on our website.

03/12/2026

We are pleased to announce the publication of the Winter 2025 issue of SEEJ!

Articles:
Dmitry Arzyutov and Laura Siragusa: Writing Without Letters: Inscriptive Practices in Trans-Indigenous Arctic Literacy History

Jiyoung Hong: Gothic Shadow Play in Plato's Cave: Nikolai Karamzin's "The Island of Bornholm"

Gabriel Nussbaum: Remembrance as Physiological Style in Early Tolstoy

Byungsam Jung: Literary Ventriloquism: A Dialogue Between Framing and Framed Narrative in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's "The History of A Town"

Kelly Gallagher: Heretical Identities: Gender, Selfhood, and Power in Zamiatin's "We"

03/04/2026

In SEEJ 69.3, Giuseppina Larocca examines and discusses the meaning and the profound relationship established between body and power in the short story “Devushka Roza” (“Young Rosa,” 1944) by Andrei Platonov, situating it within the context of the writer’s later works while also considering his previous novels and short stories. In “Young Rosa,” the representation of the body serves as a priem, a literary device Platonov employs to move beyond of dichotomy “individual” and “collective,” toward a broader understanding of the interplay between the “individual” and “power.” A close reading of the story and an analysis of its different editions demonstrate how Platonov was developing a reflection on totalitarian systems and, more specifically, on the role of violence as one of the principal tools through which regimes—in this case the Soviet regime—seek to exercise power over individuals. Rosa’s body is not only subjected to torture, but also becomes the symbol of an absolute loss of self, a nullification of the human being, which annihilates her to the point of complete dissolution of her own identity.

02/25/2026

Congratulations to this year's SEEJ award winners!

02/18/2026

In "The Indexical Finger of Soviet Stop-Motion Animation: Sarra Mokil’s Directorial Debut," Anne Eakin Moss (University of Chicago) calls attention to a neglected pioneer of cinematic innovation—puppet artist, animator, and director Sarra Mokil. In so doing, Moss identifies forms of cinematic thinking that are expressed not in the male-dominated field of logocentric film theory of Mokil's time and place, but in the practical, intuitive, but no less theorized praxis of filmmaking itself. Moss speculates on the kind of experiment and critical thinking that were done on Mokil's first project, puppetry for the short “The Master of Life,” and then treat briefly the history of puppetry as a satirical form in the Soviet Union through consideration of her work on "The New Gulliver." Moss then turns to the fairy tale world Mokil created in her first two short films, asking how Mokil's approach to world creation, character movement, and cinematography reflect the expectations placed on her by industry and audience in the context of Stalinist cultural repression.

This article is part of a special cluster in our Fall 2025 issue, "Parallel Tracks: Women Filmmakers in Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Cinema."

02/11/2026

SEEJ 69.3 includes the article “'I Want to Make a Film About Women': The Story of Esfir Shub's Unrealized Feminist Manifesto" by Anastasia Kostina (Columbia University).

Kostina writes that in 1932, acclaimed Soviet documentarian and pioneer of the found footage compilation film, Esfir Shub, announced her intention to make a film about women. Described by her as “a cinematic document about Soviet women,” the project aimed to combine an observational approach with an intense dramatic structure. By the end of 1933, Shub and her co-author, Soviet writer Boris Lapin, had completed a seven-chapter script titled Women, which focused on four individual heroines. Alas, Shub’s cinematic document about women never came to fruition and survives only as a collection of documents—including the script, some notes, and a handful of photographs selected by the director for the film. Kostina's article reclaims the story of Shub’s unrealized feminist manifesto, Women. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, it reconstructs a continuous history of the project and uses this historical context to analyze the script, shedding light on what is arguably the most obscure—and most important—period of Shub’s filmmaking career. Kostina demonstrates how Shub’s inventive documentary vision came into conflict with the ideological constraints of the state. Finally, she argues that while Shub’s innovations never reached the screen, they remain significant for offering an alternative developmental path for documentary film and for reshaping our understanding of feminist film history.

Find the abstracts for this special cluster, "Parallel Tracks: Women Filmmakers in Late-Imperial and Early Soviet Cinema" on our website.

02/04/2026

In "Bodies, Circus, and the Avant-garde in the Films of Ol´ga Preobrazhenskaia and Ivan Pravov," Emma Widdis discusses the 1929 film 'The Last Attraction' (Poslednii attraktsion), directed by Preobrazhenskaia and Pravov. Preobrazhenskaia (1881– 1971) is one of few female Soviet directors to have achieved any kind of global renown, both in her own time and since. Yet beyond her best-known film 'The Women from Riazan Province' (Baby riazanskie, 1927), her work remains little studied. Analyzing 'The Last Attraction,' Widdis reveals the complex interplay between these two directors’ varied but complementary cultural backgrounds. The film can be seen as a reflection on the relationship between political art and entertainment, and as a playful summation of its two directors’ experiences over the previous decade: their engagement, as actors and teachers, with the new State Institute of Cinema, and questions of dramatic art.

Find the complete abstract on our website!

01/29/2026

In our fall issue, Matthew Kendall (University of Illinois Chicago), argues that although the film 'Battleship Potemkin' is often singularly linked with the auteur figure of Sergei Eisenstein, it is rarely mentioned that the film’s screenplay was written by Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko (1889–1974). Kendall suggests that the dilapidated state of Agadzhanova’s archive at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii), can help explain why her efforts in this film and others have gone mostly unnoticed, mostly unnoted, and mostly forgotten. By making use of what he calls the ambivalence of archive, he suggests that an important question for research on Soviet women’s cinema practitioners asks not only what we lose when figures like Agadzhanova are eclipsed, but why it happens in the first place, and what it tells us about the writing of film history both inside of the Soviet Union and outside of it.

You can find the complete abstract for "Always Almost: Nina Agadzhanova and the Ambivalent Archive of Early Soviet Cinema" as well as the rest of the articles in this special cluster on our website.

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