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Watching Soviet cinema today: “The Woman” (1932) by Yefim Dzigan and Boris Shreyber

Olga Romanova asks what we can learn about the past from Soviet films today, and finds many examples in her case study of “The Woman”.

For many years, I taught courses on Soviet culture and cinema to Belarusian students at the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus (ECLAB) in Minsk. Unfortunately, due to political repressions, the college had to close down in 2020. Throughout the years of Belarusian independence, remnants from the Soviet Union have permeated the everyday lives of its citizens as well as the country’s colloquial and political rhetoric, often thoroughly detached from their original cultural contexts, discourses, and imaginaries. But what can we learn from watching Soviet movies today?

The movies in question bear complex meaning pertaining to different Soviet eras and transition periods. Through an informed viewing, we not only perceive the official agenda—be it political, ideological, or cultural—but also traces of social and political tensions, metaphors, and “clues” on historical reality. Historicizing these movies and understanding their initial cultural and social context as part of a sociocultural analysis of film allows to uncover implicit, often unintentional meanings inherent to this cinematic heritage.

I.

My analysis here will focus on the social drama The Woman (Женщина), a late masterpiece of Soviet avant-garde cinema directed by Yefim Dzigan and Boris Shreyber. Artistically and stylistically, this widely forgotten silent movie provides one of the most vivid and interesting pre-War filmic representations of collectivization and village life on Belarusian territory. Produced by Belgoskino, the first Belarusian state-run film studio, and released throughout the Soviet Union in the summer of 1932 through an all-Union distribution, The Woman portrays the difficulties of establishing life on a collective farm.

The film’s narrative is told through the prism of women’s experiences. Its main protagonist Mashka dreams of becoming a tractor driver. All the female characters habitually suffer and submit to masculine oppression, humiliation, or jovial condescension. The master of the Machine and Tractor Station (MTS) refuses to train Mashka because he believes that a baba (pejorative for “country woman, broad”) is unable to comprehend the necessary technical and mechanical knowledge. Likewise, Mashka’s husband throws her mechanic’s handbook into the furnace, shouting at her: “A woman’s business is farming and childbirth!” With respect to the conflict between patriarchal attitudes and feminist ideas, the movie seems relevant even in the context of contemporary discourses. At the same time, however, it refers to ideas of early Soviet feminism—a feminism that was to come to an end four years later with the onset of the era of Stalinist traditionalism and the subsequent establishment of a specific form of Soviet patriarchy, resulting in both mandatory participation of women in “socialist building” and reproductive labor (for example, through the ban on abortion in 1936). While Mashka is expected to fulfil a secondary role due to her gender, male tractor drivers and mechanics defend their exclusive right to a privileged status that yields higher incomes than work on collective farms, greater mobility, and the possibility of actively partaking in building up communism. From a feminist perspective, this discriminatory attitude can be seen as a topical metaphor for the phenomenon of the invisible “glass ceiling” that women are still continuously up against.

Stylistically, The Woman references two famous montage films on the collectivization of the countryside in the late 1920s: Sergei Eisenstein’s Old and New / General Line (Старое и новое / Генеральная линия, 1929, Sovkino) and Alexander Dovzhenko’s The Earth (Земля, 1930, Kiev Film Factory VUFKU). Dovzhenko’s film was heavily attacked in the wake of the First Five-Year Plan 1928–1932, as avant-garde aesthetics came under growing pressure as part of an increasingly unified public cultural discourse. Central Moscow newspapers accused Dovzhenko of “myth-making,” “kulak philosophy,” and denounced the “biologism” (meaning the naturalism) present in certain scenes. The Woman was criticized for similar “ideological errors,” its excessive “naturalism,” and its promotion of a “cult of femininity and fertility.” However, since aesthetic norms and the cultural policy in this period were still relatively inconsistent, and due to the international reputation of Soviet avant-garde film, both movies were licensed to be distributed internationally. Back in 1930, The Earth had been a success with European moviegoers. The Woman was broadly distributed throughout the West. In the US, however, the Hays Code only allowed for a censored version to be shown that omitted all so-called “naturalistic shots.”

II.

Of course, a silent black and white movie made over 90 years ago challenges today’s viewers and their viewing habits. And yet, it is a worthwhile experience. Firstly, as a film that engages with everyday life, The Woman vividly depicts attitudes and peasant survival strategies during the early years of Stalin’s collectivization and the modernization of the village. Secondly, it demonstrates the strategies of ideology, the methods by which it reconstructs reality, and how, to a certain degree, these may be considered as universal. And, thirdly, the film can also be seen as a topical parable for female emancipation, revealing how patriarchal attitudes dominate everyday life on all levels and generally determine men’s behavior towards women, regardless of ideology or political rhetoric.

The strongly emotional scenes, in particular, still captivate today’s viewers through their representation of women’s pain, despair, and silent screams. A sequence depicting a “double ordeal” powerfully combines two events by editing them in a rhythmic parallel montage. One scene shows the chairwoman of the collective farm suffering from the demanding physical labor while the parallel scene shows Mashka undergoing a test at the MTS during which the male workers decide to play a joke on her by making her carry a red-hot bolt in her hand.

By intercutting a long shot of Mashka’s tense arm with shots of the hard-working woman (an example of Soviet montage technique), the directors convey a state of extreme pain. It is interesting to note how today’s young people perceive such a sequence. Among my students, two reactions dominated. Some of them associated the images shown with their personal movie experiences. For example, one of the students said the sequence reminded her of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, specifically the scene when Alex, in a close-up, is forced to watch acts of violence while his eyes are forcibly pried open. Others reacted more emotionally, often ignoring all the ideological messaging. The receptive gap between perceptions of the audience of the early 1930s to whom the message is addressed and the young viewers of today is the starting point for my research questions and film analysis. First, we need to reconstruct the political, ideological, and social contexts and understand the film’s meanings and emotional messages. Regarding the “double ordeal” sequence described above, we need to ask: Why does Mashka endure the pain, and why is it presented as just as inevitable as childbirth? What is the ideological message that the directors attempt to convey here?

In the early 1930s, when the Soviet state commissioned a studio and selected a director to make a film about collective farm life, it had to offer solutions to certain ideological challenges. For instance, such a film had to legitimize the ideology and methods of collectivization while also providing an ideological response to the waves of peasant protests against forced collectivization sweeping the USSR in 1929/30. By the time The Woman was released, these protests were still ongoing in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Furthermore, films had to support new campaigns of mechanization and women’s emancipation that was propagated under the slogan “Woman to the tractor!”

Not only does a sociocultural analysis reconstruct the cultural-political contexts of these filmic resolutions of real-life contradictions, but it also allows to uncover deeper layers of meaning. Even though The Woman is a silent movie, there is a lot of crying and screaming. The most furious, masterfully shot and edited altercation takes place at a well. At the well, peasant women habitually gather to collect water and share news. It is here that the wife of a kulak provokes a scandal. Instructed by her husband, she pits the peasant Ulyana, a poverty-stricken mother of many children, against Mashka. The women fight and yell, hysteria spreads among the other women who pour buckets of water over each other as they scream: “Beat her! She’s destroying women’s life!”

Fig. 14: Frames from “The Woman” (23.20–25.57, the scene at the well)

This outrage must be interpreted more broadly as a reflection of the conflict’s intensity in the villages which peaked at the beginning of Stalin’s collectivization. With the abolition of tsarist serfdom in the Russian Empire in 1861 in mind, many peasants saw collective farms as a second serfdom. They had to give their land back to the state and were generally suspicious of any modernization. However, the film attempts to conceal this reality that secret service workers of the OGPU (All-Union State Political Administration) spelled out in secret reports on the mood of the peasants. Furthermore, the scene had to channel hostility towards the ideologically correct object—the kulaks. This becomes obvious in the agitating, propagandistic finale of the movie in which an embittered kulak tries to annihilate the collective farm’s plentiful harvest.

The Woman not only manages to convey this official political message, it also inadvertently captures the tense atmosphere in an early 1930s Soviet village. Its visual language unwittingly translates gender and social conflicts that escalated following Stalin’s attempt to uncompromisingly reorganize traditional peasant life. The directors conceived the “double ordeal” sequence as a metaphor for the suffering and hardship that Soviet peasant women had to endure for the sake of the good new life on the collective farm. However, the associative montage generates additional meanings that the directors most likely did not intend to convey. The pain associated with breaking the traditional pattern is juxtaposed with the pain of childbirth and captured in images of trial and humiliation. Shots of the rich harvest and the satisfaction of the MTS director with the accomplished work reflect the position of the state. It is not the peasants, but the state that controls and enjoys the results of modernized peasant labor. It is therefore symptomatic that the result of the work is “accepted” by the MTS director which endows the film’s climax with patriarchal connotations on women’s emancipation. In addition to this poignant depiction and criticism of patriarchal society, which remains relevant to this day, the visual poetics of the film help uncover an aspect that is mostly silenced or even completely omitted in the contemporary appropriation and recoding of the Soviet past, including the mass violence during the forced collectivization: the trauma of collectivization.

III.

Furthermore, since this film engages with the first wave of Soviet feminism, it can also be seen as a parable on the nature of overt and covert resistance to women’s emancipation—a parable that, unfortunately, has not lost any of its relevance. This is especially true for contemporary authoritarian regimes that grew out of the former Soviet empire, where the elites increasingly implement patriarchal rhetoric to defend the interests of the “traditional family.” In 2020, for instance, the Belarusian president Lukashenko claimed that a woman cannot be president, because it is an impossible job for her. These regimes follow the model of Stalinist traditionalism which relied on paternalistic patterns while seeing people as a mere means for mobilization and as a reproductive resource.

The montage techniques that Dzigan and Shreyber used in The Woman reveal traces of a traumatic reality as well as the ideological construction behind the making of the film. The Woman can therefore be read as a testament to the trauma of collectivization, and the layers of restored meanings speak to the complexity of the cultural fabric that Soviet cinema both displayed and constructed—and that we now approach as a form of cultural heritage. It is of utmost importance to engage with such works both in research and in education, especially since the Soviet past is actively mythologized in official mass media, increasingly becoming a means of political manipulation—up to the rehabilitation of Stalin and “Stalin’s merits” in contemporary Russian and Belarusian propaganda.


Olga Romanova was a Leibniz “Value of the Past” fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin in the fall of 2023. This essay is part of her research project “The Hidden Heritage of Soviet Belarusian Films of the 1920s–1980s. Rediscovering and Recontextualizing the Past through Film Material.”


This essay was first published on the ZfL BLOG (Blog des Leibniz-Zentrums für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin). It is republished here with kind permission.

Der filmische Bericht “Bildersturm im Dritten Reich” (1965)

Dr. des. Nora Jaeger (Universität Bonn) über den westdeutschen Umgang mit der NS-Kunstpolitik in den 1960er Jahren.

Der Bericht “Bildersturm im Dritten Reich” (1965) ist ein vielstimmiges Zeitdokument, das die damalige Debatte um die nationalsozialistische Kunstpolitik widerspiegelt. Die Debatte, die von einer binären Kategorisierung der Künstler als systemkonform versus „entartet“ ausging, prägte das Bild der NS-Kunstpolitik ebenso wie das der Avantgardekunst des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts.

The report ‘Bildersturm im Dritten Reich’ (1965) is a contemporary document that reflects the debate surrounding Nazi art policy at the time. The debate, which was based on a binary categorisation of artists as conforming to the system versus ‘degenerate’ (‚entartet‘), shaped the image of Nazi art policy as well as that of avant-garde art in the early 20th century.


Ein quellenreicher Fundus für die Forschung

Im Jahr 1965 produzierte der Bayerische Rundfunk unter der Leitung von Massimo Sani und Helmut Dotterweich die fast einstündige Dokumentation Bildersturm im Dritten Reich, der von der ‚entarteten‘ Kunst und ihren Künstlern im Nationalsozialismus handelt. Den Höhepunkt markiert das Jahr 1937 als in zahlreichen Museen mehr als 20.000 Werke beschlagnahmt wurden. Die Aktion mündete im selbigen Jahr in der Ausstellung Entartete Kunst. Gezeigt wurde sie in den Hofgartenarkaden in München, ebendort wurde als Propagandamaßnahme auf diffamierende Weise öffentlichkeitswirksam ein Teil der konfiszierten Werke gezeigt.

Der Film ist aus vielerlei Perspektiven (kunst-)historisch aufschlussreich. Einerseits bildet der Bericht für die Oral History ein wichtiges Zeugnis, indem er Akteure aus dem Kunstsektor des 20. Jahrhunderts zeigt, die von ihren Erinnerungen an den nationalsozialistischen Kunstbetrieb berichten. Andererseits eröffnen die Filmsequenzen einen Eindruck von den Arbeitsplätzen und Wirkungsstätten kunsthistorischer Persönlichkeiten und den wirkmächtigen (Selbst-)Inszenierungen und Darstellungen. So zeigen die Aufnahmen Künstler in ihren mit Bildern gefüllten Ateliers, Kunsthändler in repräsentativen Galerie- und Büroräumlichkeiten oder Museumsdirektoren an ihrem Entscheidungsort. Vor allem aber zeigt der Film den Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus nach 1945: Er vermittelt einen Status Quo über die Forschungen und Debatten der 1960er Jahre zum nationalsozialistischen Kunst- und Kulturbetrieb und lässt erkennen, wie dieser aufgefasst wurde.

Aus heutiger Perspektive verdeutlicht der filmische Bericht das zu dieser Zeit vorherrschende binäre Denken von systemkonformen versus ‚entarteten‘ Künstlern. Diese Ausrichtung bestimmt den Dokumentationsanfang: Der Bericht [0:43–1:40 min.] beginnt mit einer bodennahen Kamerafahrt entlang eines Portikus. Eine Stimme aus dem Off ertönt. Es sind Ausschnitte aus einer Rede Adolf Hitlers zu hören. Die kolossalen Kolonnaden lassen auf den im neoklassizistischen Stil errichteten Monumentalbau schließen, der von dem Architekten Paul Ludwig Troost als lichtdurchflutetes Ausstellungshaus mit dem Ziel entworfen wurde, die neue deutsche Staatskunst zu präsentieren. Darin fanden von 1937 bis 1944 jährlich die sogenannten Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellungen statt, die zugleich auch Verkaufsausstellung waren. Das Gegenstück dazu stellte die bereits erwähnte Ausstellung Entartete Kunst dar.

Screenshot aus der Dokumentation Bildersturm im Dritten Reich (1965) [2:52 min.]. Einblick in die Gedächtnisausstellung Entartete Kunst – Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren in München.

Kanonisierung der Avantgarde nach 1945

In der nächsten Szene [2:00–3:16 min.] führt uns eine Kamerafahrt durch eine Ausstellung. Die Perspektive wandert von Raum zu Raum, vorbei an Max Liebermanns Bildnis Otto Braun (1932) und August Mackes Kleiner Zoologischer Garten in Braun und Gelb (1912). Schließlich richtet sich das Blickfeld auf zahlreiche Besucher*innen, die mit interessierten und neugierigen Blicken die ausgestellten Werke bestaunen. Es handelt sich um die großangelegte und vielbeachtete Gedächtnisausstellung Entartete Kunst – Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren, die eine Zusammenstellung der sogenannten „Klassiker der Moderne“ präsentierte und in Gedenken an die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst in München von 1937 ins Leben gerufen wurde. Im Vorwort des Ausstellungskatalogs heißt es, dass die „Auswahl als subjektiv“ zu bezeichnen wäre, so haben „nur Arbeiten der wichtigsten oder für jene Zeit am meisten charakteristischen Künstler berücksichtigt werden können“. Die Ausstellung wurde als Gegenentwurf in den Räumlichkeiten des „Hauses für deutsche Kunst“ ausgerichtet. Sie verfolgte den Anspruch, dass die verfemten Künstler sprichwörtlich „rehabilitiert“ würden. Besonders prominent vertreten war der expressionistische Künstler und das Brücke-Mitglied Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In der Ausstellung zu sehen war z.B. das Ölgemälde Die Straße (1913). Einst hing das Werk im Berliner Kronprinzenpalais bis es 1937 als ‚entartet‘ beschlagnahmt wurde und durch den Kunsthändler Karl Buchholz nach New York ins Museum of Modern Art gelang, wo es sich seitdem befindet.

Zugleich wurde durch die getätigte Auswahl eine Kanonisierung der Avantgarde vorgenommen. Diesen Aspekt thematisiert auch die Monatszeitschrift Das Schönste im Dezember-Heft von 1962. Die Zeitschrift hatte sich im Rahmen einer Artikelserie ausführlich mit dem Bildersturm von 1937 beschäftigt und dabei auch die Münchner Gedenkausstellung von 1962 unter die Lupe genommen. Kritisiert wurde die subjektive Auswahl der ‚entarteten‘ Künstler, die wichtige Vertreter wie Wilhelm Morgner oder Johannes Molzahn bei der Werkpräsentation völlig unberücksichtigt ließ. 

Aufarbeitung der NS-Kunstpolitik in den 1960er Jahren

Den Machern ging es bei der Filmproduktion weniger um die ästhetische Beurteilung der verfemten Kunst, sondern vielmehr war das Ziel: „die Ereignisse [zu] schildern nach den Aussagen derjenigen, die sie selbst erlebten.“ Vor diesem Hintergrund setzen sich im Verlauf des Films die Geschehnisse durch eine Vielzahl an Zeitzeugenberichten wie ein Mosaik Stück für Stück zusammen. Zu den Zeitzeugen gehören Künstler wie Otto Dix, Ewald Mataré und Wilhelm Nay, deren Kunst einst als ‚entartet‘ bezeichnet wurde. Ebenso kommen Nachfahren und Verwandte von verstorbenen Künstlern wie Ernst Barlach, Oskar Schlemmer oder Willy Baumeister zu Wort. Aus dem Kunstbetrieb sprechen die einflussreichen Kunsthändler Günther Franke und Alex Vömel sowie die Museumsdirektoren Ludwig Grothe, Eberhard Hanfstaengl und Alfred Hentzen. Letztere hatten die Beschlagnahmeaktion im Jahr 1937 im Kronprinzenpalais der Berliner Nationalgalerie eigens miterlebt.

Im weiteren Verlauf des Films [34:56–36:57 min.] wird der Kunsthistoriker und Künstler Franz Roh eingeblendet. Von ihm war 1962 (also nur wenige Jahre vor der Dokumentation) die Publikation Entartete Kunst. Kunstbarbarei im Dritten Reich erschienen, die ausschließlich einen Fokus auf die ‚entartete‘ Kunst legte. Außerdem kam die Literaturwissenschaftlerin Hildegard Brenner zu Wort [39:51–42:40 min.]. 1963 war im Rowohlt-Verlag ihre einschlägige Publikation Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus erschienen, die erstmals ausführlicher nicht nur den organisierten Kunstraub in den besetzten Gebieten in Frankreich und Polen behandelte, sondern auch die polykratischen Strukturen des nationalsozialistischen Kunst- und Kulturbetrieb offenlegte. Aus der Vogelperspektive wird Brenner, die an einem mit Schriften und Dokumenten gefüllten Sekretär sitzt, an ihrer Schreibmaschine tippend dargestellt.

Screenshot aus der Dokumentation Bildersturm im Dritten Reich (1965) [39:34 min.]. Hildegard Brenner sitzt an einem Sekretär.

Den Zuschauer*innen wird suggeriert, dass die eifrige Wissenschaftlerin sich mitten im Schreibprozess befindet, als die Kamera sie in Frontalsicht auffängt und ihre Arbeit unterbricht: Brenner erzählt u.a. von den rassenideologischen Vorstellungen des Kampfbundes für deutsche Kultur und den Rivalitätskämpfen zwischen Alfred Rosenberg und Joseph Goebbels. Dabei werden immer wieder für wenige Sekunden Dokumente [40:35–41:39 min.] eingeblendet: Ausschnitte eines Zeitungsartikels und eines Briefs vom Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, der an einen gewissen Otto Andreas Schreiber adressiert ist. Brenner erzählt von einem Protest des Studentenbundes, bei dem Schreiber damals ein führendes Mitglied war und sich für ausgewählte expressionistische Künstler einsetzte. Diese unscheinbar wirkenden Filmsequenzen sind retrospektiv höchst relevant, denn die eingeblendeten Dokumente stammen aus Schreibers Privatbesitz und geben einen Einblick in bis dato unveröffentlichte Quellen zur Expressionismusdebatte in den Jahren 1933/34.

Für einen differenzierten Umgang mit der NS-Kunstpolitik und ihrer Nachgeschichte

Die vielbeachtete Münchener Gedächtnisausstellung von 1962, die den Auftakt des filmischen Berichts bildet, trug dazu bei, dass die ‚entartete‘ Kunst im Nachkriegsdeutschland rehabilitiert wurde, was sich u.a. durch eine steigende Ausstellungstätigkeit und Museumsankäufe von beispielsweise expressionistischen Kunstwerken deutlich zeigt. Allerdings musste ein ‚entarteter‘ nicht zwangsläufig auch ein verfolgter Künstler gewesen sein, sondern konnte durchaus unbehelligt weiter am Kunstbetrieb teilnehmen. Ebenfalls gab es Künstler, deren Werke sowohl in der Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellung zu sehen als auch von der Beschlagnahmeaktion 1937 betroffen waren. Aktuelle kunsthistorische Forschungen zeigen eine differenzierte Herangehensweise, die mehr als zwei Betrachtungsweisen von systemkonformer und ‚entarteten‘ Künstlern zulässt. Ein gelungenes Beispiel ist das Brücke-Museum in Berlin, welches mit der Ausstellung Flucht in die Bilder? Die Künstler der Brücke im Nationalsozialismus (2019) der Frage nach Brüchen und Kontinuitäten am Beispiel der Brücke-Künstler im Nationalsozialismus und nach 1945 nachgegangen ist und die Entwicklungen historisch und kritisch aufgearbeitet hat.


Links

Forschungsstelle „Entartete Kunst“ und Beschlagnahmeinventar

GDK Research – Bildbasierte Forschungsplattform zu den Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellungen 1937-1944 in München


Leseempfehlung

Meike Hoffmann und Dieter Scholz (Hg.): Unbewältigt? Ästhetische Moderne und Nationalsozialismus, Kunst, Kunsthandel, Ausstellungspraxis, Verbrecher Verlag: 2020.


Dr. des. Nora Jaeger ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Kunsthistorischen Institut der Universität Bonn. Im September 2023 war sie Leibniz “Value of the Past” Fellow am Institut für Zeitgeschichte in München. Foto: privat.

Titelbild: Screenshot aus der Dokumentation “Bildersturm im Dritten Reich” (1965) [01:50 min.]

A Tea Bowl from Chu

Danijela Lugarić Vukas (University of Zagreb) on Oxana Timofeeva’s Book “How to Love a Homeland” and the Role of Autofictionality in the Age of War

At the beginning of his more than two-hour long interview with Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin began defending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a thorough historical lecture about Russian history, focusing on events coming from the ninth century. Although Putin stated before his talk that he would offer a minute-long history of Russia, his lecture ended up lasting longer than thirty minutes. This is just one illustrative example of how, in today’s Russia, history and past events serve as a meticulous subject of violent politicization.

In his article “Presentism, Politicization of History, and the New Role of the Historian in Russia,” published in 2021, Ivan Kurilla writes about state-controlled historical policy in 21st century Russia, reminding that in the spring of 2014, a group of pro-Kremlin Duma deputies introduced the first “memorial law” in Russia. Moreover, than minister of culture Vladimir Medinskii repeatedly proclaimed that “useful myths” 1 are more important than facts, and that the only valid historical research is the one that acts according to the national interests of Russia.

As Nikita Petrov, in his article “The Soviet Past and the 1945 Victory Cult as Civil Religion in Contemporary Russia,” further emphasizes, “the past, complete with the notion of a sacral, all-powerful state, in particular, is making a strong comeback in Russia”. 2

In these circumstances, contemporary Russian literature (“soft memory” in Alexander Etkind’s understanding) often provides one of the major steps against political contraventions and infringements. Acts of rewriting the Russian past in literary works of authors such as Maria Stepanova, Sergey Lebedev, Liudmila Ulitskaya, or Polina Barskova (to name just a few), which are largely motivated by personal family (hi)stories and post-memorial imaginative investment from the position of displaced and marginalized individuals, are not only a way of reclaiming ownership of the nation’s past but also – by intervening in hegemonic cultural narratives – act as a kind of cultural ecology.

The Invention of Home

Traveling in personal memories, and creating narratives, becomes a way of getting under the skin of history.

Book cover “How to love a homeland” by Oxana Timofeeva. The English version was published in 2021.

In this context, autofictional writings which provide a platform to underrepresented feminist voices serve as particularly thought-provoking example of literary depictions of lived experience of displacement. Exiled philosopher Oxana Timofeeva returns, in her book “How to love a homeland” (“Rodina”), which was discussed at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin on February 8, 2024, to her childhood memories in order to establish a bottom-up link between the past and the present. By going back to three “small homelands” of her childhood, the small cities of Kozhevnikovo, Chu, and Surgut, Timofeeva emphasizes the process of becoming (rather than merely being) through her childhood recollections. Emotions triggered by such temporal and spatial travels (rather than by fixed events, as in Putin’s above-mentioned interview) underlines the subjective embodied experience of history, with autofictionality serving to further emphasize that the selfhood itself is always invented, created, fictionalized.

The village of Kozhevnikovo (close to Tomsk) in Russia in 2010. Wikimedia Commons.

From the standpoint of the autofictional narrator, prioritizing the spatialization of time (being) over the annihilation of space by time (becoming) becomes an impossibility task because the latter – during the war – would draw attention to the futureless perspective of one’s experience. The annihilation of space by time occurs when the narrator repeatedly accentuates that the location itself is not self-contained: the space (a homeland) becomes loaded with meaning only when the story, or a memory, is tied to it. For example, “A priori, the innate of the memory are considered trophies (like my tea bowl from Chu) that connect us to this place, whatever it may be” (p. 72).

The philosopher’s vulnerability, as expressed in this book, is not a flaw, but rather opens an alternative system of values, while ruptures are an opportunity for progression and new creation. Timofeeva’s book is telling us that a homeland is not something to be found but – rather – to invent. Moreover, texts like this, by maintaining that trauma and triumph are mutually exclusive, allow for a future perspective. Not only that taking off (deterritorialization) is a prerequisite for reterritorialization (attaching to the new place), but the latter is inherently more temporal than spatial endeavor because “true reterritorialization is the one in utopia – the utopia of the future, as opposed to the one of the past” (p. 76).

A healing journey?

Traveling back in time and through spaces of her former homeland(s) demonstrates that memory is constantly in motion, while the sense of fragmented, fragile reality mediated through memories evokes post-Soviet reality, making obvious that there is no dialogue between history and (individual, communicative) memory in post-Soviet Russia. Moreover, journeying shifts her story into a dynamic mode, establishing an intermediate, transgressive zone in which the narrator detaches from customary coordinates and routines, reinforced by hegemonic cultural narratives of triumph, glorious past, patriotism, and nationalism.

Moving from one space (Kozhevnikovo) to another (Surgut) and concluding the journey with philosophical conceptualization of what it means to possess and love a homeland has a healing effect for exiled intellectual because turning to memories establishes a space for a possible reconciliation:

“Entering a relationship of mutual negation with the homeland, emigration recreates it through itself in the new place, reestablishing its locus – such is the dialectics of exile. Homeland does not exist without its people, but it can move freely with them around the world. The coldness of our forests, the breadth of our steppes is always with us. Unpacking on new planets, just like now, we will continue to take out and put on a prominent spot our small Chu bowls from Earth” (p. 63).

Endless forests in the Yugansky nature reserve in the Surgut Region. Picture taken in 2012. Wikimedia Commons.

Taking roots

So, what kind of homeland could be achieved for displaced and marginalized intellectuals during wartime? If it would be possible to create one homeland from three small Timofeeva’s homelands, the ideal homeland would not be a state – because borders are always an instrument of oppression –, nor would it be an anthropocentric world – because it would have to be replaced by the biocentric.

Hence, “To love means not merely to (re)territorialize like an animal but also to take root like a plant. It does not have to be our own root; we can create an artistic alliance of the animal and the vegetative and plant flowers all over the land that we love with all our soul. Across all states’ borders tying us to a certain territory by protocol, the love for homeland must be free, so that every time, coming back to a new, unprecedented place, every one of us can say: I am from here” (pp. 86-87).

By designing this specific kind of stateless citizenship, Timofeeva makes obvious that, in the age of war and displacement, gestures that transgress forbiddances of return are political actions through which one re-establish one’s sense of human agency. 


Danijela Lugarić Vukas (University of Zagreb) recieved the Leibniz-Fellowship “Value of the Past” in 2023 to visit the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL).

Header picture: The Kazakh-Kyrgyz border in the Jambyl Region of Kazakhstan, close to Chu, in 2023. Wikimedia Commons.


  1. Kurilla, Ivan. 2021. “Presentism, Politicization of History, and the New Role of the Historian in Russia”. In: Weiss-Wendt, Anton; Adler, Nanci (eds.) The Future of the Soviet Past. The Politics of History in Putin’s Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. P. 37.[]
  2. Petrov, Nikita. 2021. “The Soviet Past and the 1945 Victory Cult as Civil Religion in Contemporary Russia”. In: Weiss-Wendt, Anton; Adler, Nanci (eds.) The Future of the Soviet Past. The Politics of History in Putin’s Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. P. 71.[]