The Slavic Literature Pod

Show Notes:
This week, on For Your Consideration, Cameron dives into John Williams' 1960 novel, Butcher's Crossing, a cautionary tale about how reading Ralph Waldo Emerson can drive you into buffalo-murdering madness.
It's not uncommon to see the novel compared to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, but after reading both...he's skeptical. It seems that they don't share much more than a genre.
This episode has a two-fold purpose: 1) To cover Butcher's Crossing's adept take on the Western and 2) Why we should all be more skeptical about the act of comparing things, especially these two novels.

Butcher's Crossing: The Husks and Shells of Exploitation by Jack Brenner: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43017669
Pragmatist Individuals and the Nineteenth-Century American West in Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose and John Williams's Butcher's Crossing by Gregory Alan Phipps: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27117925
The Influence of Jacob Boehme's Aurora on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian by Lydia R. Cooper: https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2025.2608966
Aurora the Day Spring Or Dawning of the Day in the East Or Morning-Redness in the Rising of the SUN by Jacob Boehme: https://jacobboehmeonline.com/assets/docs/AURORA.18693240.pdf

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron dives into Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” a dramatization of one chapter of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate: the final letter Anna Semionova writes her son, Viktor Shtrum, from a Jewish ghetto.

We’ll get into how Wiseman adapts this troubling, poignant chapter into film, why I think this chapter is the best encapsulation of Grossman’s ideas in Life and Fate, and some thoughts on why he remains so provocative today. 

Quick note: At one point in this episode I misspeak and say that the Vlasovite Russian Liberation Army was entirely Russian, which was not the case. It was primarily made of of Russian former Red Army soldiers, but did include Soviet defectors of other ethnicities more broadly.

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Show Notes:
This week, you and Cameron get into some PREP WORK for an upcoming episode about Frederick Wiseman’s 2002 film “The Last Letter,” which dramatizes a chapter of Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. 

In preparation for that episode, we’ll read that dramatized chapter — Part 1, Chapter 18, Anna Semyonova’s final letter to her son, Viktor Shtrum — along with two other letters Grossman wrote to his mother after her death. 

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Show Notes:

This week, Dr. José Vergara returns to the podcast to talk about Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools. The novel, first published in English in 1977, follows student so-and-so (and his double) as he attempts to tell events of his life. The novel doesn’t follow a linear plot — or even an easy-to-distinguish narrator — and puts you on your toes as you meander between stories.

Dr. Vergara is an associate professor of Russian in the Bryn Mawr College’s Department of Russian. He is the author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature, a co-editor of Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, and aa co-editor of the digital annotated edition of Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf.
Link to Encyclopedia of the Dog: https://encyclopediaofthedog.com/

The Embodied Language of Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools by José Vergara: https://doi.org/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.97.3.0426
Sasha Sokolov: ‘Here Comes Everybody’ Meets ‘Those Who Came’ by José Vergara: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv1fkgbqh.9

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Show Notes:

This week, Cameron takes on the back half of Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, covering chapters 25-43. As our characters finally arrive in the town of Chevengur, we go from a picaresque romp around the newly-Soviet countryside into the dirty work of actually building Communism. 

“Danger and Deliverance: Reading Andrei Platonov” by Angela Livingstone

“Chevengur: On the Road with Bolshevik Utopia” by David Bethea in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction

“Chevengur: Buried in the Family Plot” by Elior Borenstein in Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929

The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube. 

Our links: Website | ⁠Discord⁠ 
Socials: Instagram⁠ | BlueSky | Twitter⁠ | Facebook

Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands