NARRAZIONI IN LINGUA RUSSA DAL CAUCASO SETTENTRIONALE POST-SOVIETICO: IDENTITÀ E MEMORIA NELLE OPERE DI ALISA GANIEVA, DINA ARMA E GERMAN SADULAEV

Internal and external migration processes, as well as the policies of linguistic acculturation and assimilation that affected the Russian Empire and its successor states, have given Russian literature and culture a widespread and polycentric character. Literary and cultural production in the Russian language, in fact, transcends Russia’s national borders and involves a plurality of actors differing in terms of citizenship and ethnicity. In particular, as far as literature is concerned, the Russian Empire’s and Soviet Union’s linguistic and cultural policies toward ethnic minorities resulted in the birth of a Russian-language literature by non-Russian ethnic authors. Several studies have dealt with this phenomenon in the former Soviet republics, while significantly less attention has been paid to the Russian-language literature of the indigenous minorities of the Russian Federation. The current work contributes to filling this gap by examining the contemporary literary production of non-Russian authors from the North Caucasus, a region that has been shaped in Russian imagination as a “Domestic East” since its violent conquest by the Tsarist Empire (19th century). The research focused on two interconnected topics – identity and memory – which were explored in the works of fiction (short stories, povest’, and novels) by three North Caucasian writers – Alisa Ganieva (b. 1985), Dina Arma (pseudonym of Madina Chakuaševa, b. 1959), and German Sadulaev (b. 1973) – with the aim of offering a “marginal” perspective, still missing, on the identity dynamics affecting contemporary Russia. To that purpose, a theoretical framework that combines tools from Postcolonial theories with those from Memory and Trauma Studies was used. The first chapter of this work establishes the historical and cultural context for the study’s subject. First, the main historical stages of the North Caucasian peoples’ complex relationship with (imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet) Russia are depicted, as are the circumstances that led to other North Caucasian peoples being regarded as exotic outsiders. Secondly, an in-depth overview of Russia’s identity and memory policies from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present is provided. The second chapter addresses the issue of the canon of socialist realism in its relation to the literature of the peoples of the USSR. The first part of the chapter demonstrates how the Soviet canon contributed to spread the Orientalist discourse in the literature of the USSR’s socalled “Asian” peoples. By analysing Ganieva’s novel Prazdničnaja gora [The Festive Mountain, 2012], it is demonstrated how, by employing the tools of parody and “plurivocity”, the author creates a work capable of deconstructing dominant discourses (including that of Soviet Orientalism) and proposes a new type of narrative about the Caucasus. The second part of the chapter looks at how non-Russian writers used local cultural elements in Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Through an examination of two works – Sadulaev’s composition Illi (2006) and Ganieva’s novel Ženich i nevesta [Groom and Bride, 2015] – it is demonstrated that the local tradition, from being a “shell” filled with ideological messages and a purely decorative factor in Soviet multinational literature, becomes a structural element capable of mediating new meanings in the work of the two writers: on the one hand, providing a way to discuss the identity and moral crises of post-war Chechnya (Sadulaev), and on the other, by creating a selectively “opaque” text that can be interpreted differently depending on the reader’s cultural background (Ganieva). The third chapter explores the concept of “home” and its opposite, homelessness, which are explored here with reference to the phenomenon of nostalgia, the condition of the unhomely (Bhabha 2004) and the chronotope of interstitiality (Tlostanova 2004). This theoretical framework is employed in the analysis of Sadulaev’s and Arma’s works. Concerning the former, it is argued that the theme of the double, which appears throughout the writer’s work, is a textual manifestation of the post-Soviet unhomely, a condition in which the individual’s inner split is inextricably linked to the external context (in this case, the trauma of the Russian-Chechen wars and colonial violence). Next, the nostalgic component in Sadulaev’s work is examined in terms of its declinations (nostalgia as mourning or as a defensive strategy), as well as of its relationship to the author’s problem of self-identification. The concept of “home” is finally investigated in Arma’s novel Doroga domoj [The Road to Home, 2009]. After describing the cities of Moscow and Nal’čik – the two “homes”, the two poles of identification around which the protagonist’s process of identity definition revolves – it is discussed how the experience of the unhomely (linked in this case to the trauma of the Circassian massacre) allows the novel’s protagonist to articulate a fluid identity capable of accommodating different cultural traditions within itself. The final chapter, which is more interdisciplinary in nature, examines the “sayability” of traumatic memories in the post-Soviet North Caucasian environment. Paying special attention to the memory landscape (museums, memorials, monuments), the dynamics by which the Russian government in the last decade has appropriated its citizens’ traumatic memories by inscribing them in a heroic narrative are identified. These same dynamics are then traced in the North Caucasian memory landscape, where traumatic memories – that of the Circassian massacre and the deportation of Ingush, Chechens, Karačai, and Balkars – have a distinctly ethno-national connotation, assuming a central role in the articulation of these populations’ collective identities. In the second part of the chapter, it is discussed that in the North Caucasian context, the memory of the victims is entrusted not to statues and monuments, but to other mediators such as art and literature. Two case studies are then considered, the video-artwork People of No Consequence (2016) by Chechen artist Aslan Goisum and a specific section of Arma’s novel Doroga domoj in which the authors offer antithetical solutions to the question of the “sayability” of traumatic memories. If, on the one hand, Goisum employs an aesthetic of absence, of silence, capable of referring (without naming it) to a counter-memory while also showing the unspeakability of deportation in the post-Soviet Chechen context; on the other hand, by reporting documents on the Circassian massacre verbatim and recording the testimony of victims of imperial and Soviet violence, Arma creates a “counter-archive” if not a “textual monument” (Etkind 2013) to her own people, able to restore “sayability" to the trauma and, with it, voice and dignity to the individual. In the conclusions, it is noted that the survey of works offered in the study revealed a varied and multifaceted reality, marked by forms of resistance to dominant discourses and Kremlin-promoted policies of erasure/appropriation of memory, as well as by the assimilation of Russian imperialist discourse. Finally, potential future research developments are mentioned.