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by The Slavic Literature Pod
The Slavic Literature Pod is your guide to the literary traditions in and around the Slavic world. On each episode, Cameron Lallana sits down with scholars, translators and other experts to dive deep into big books, short stories, film, and everything in between. You’ll get an approachable introduction to the scholarship and big ideas surrounding these canons.
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- Yesterday1h 27m
The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov
Show Notes:This week, Cameron and Una dig into Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Written after Chevengur, The Foundation Pit continues Platonov’s exploration of newly-formed Socialist life in the Soviet Union. He probes the building of not just socialism, but Soviet life through the lens of a cast of characters who are tasked with building an all-proletarian house to enshrine the collective future. A book about digging a pit on the surface, The Foundation Pit prods the Soviet obsession with big projects, post-revolution alienation, and whether the socialist future can survive the then-socialist present.A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s “The Foundation Pit.”: https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_monograph/j.ctt1zxsjhv?searchText=the%20foundation%20pit&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dthe%2Bfoundation%2Bpit%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A8dbdfb68cf18a291ecb6c0a64baafd93This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.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 | PatreonSocials: Instagram | BlueSky | Twitter | FacebookQuestions, comments, threats? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
- 1 weeks ago33 min
A new voice on the Slavic Literature Pod
Show Notes:This week, Cameron is joined by Una Vulevic: a PhD student, Anna Karenina enthusiast and...a new co-host on the show. They'll talk a little bit about her background, how she got in to Slavic literature, the importance of highlighting women's often-overlooked contributions and our theory of Slavic lit podcasting. Check out Una's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@slavicliteraturegirlUna's Substack: https://substack.com/@slavicliteraturegirlThis podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.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 | PatreonSocials: Instagram | BlueSky | Twitter | FacebookAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
- 4 weeks ago48 min
No One Talks About the War (with author Nina Kossman)
Show Notes:This week, Nina Kossman joins the podcast to talk about her upcoming book, No One Talks About the War: Travels in Ukraine During the War. A collection of short stories recollecting conversations she had while crossing Ukraine in 2023, No One Talks About the War seeks to simply document people. An attempt to avoid generalizing one person's view as everyone's perspective, her book catalogues everyday thoughts, opinions, gripes, and hopes from across the country.Pre-order No One Talks About the War here (https://www.amazon.com/No-One-Talks-About-War-ebook/dp/B0H89TP8P6).Nina Kossman is an award-winning bilingual writer, poet and translator. She’s written twelve books, including an anthology published for Oxford University Press, a book of vignettes about her childhood in the Soviet Union, several poetry collections and translations of Marina Tsvetaeva. This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.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 | PatreonSocials: Instagram | BlueSky | Twitter | FacebookQuestions, comments, threats? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
- Sep 18, 20261h 47m
Ukrainian Literary Modernism (with Drs. Halyna Babak and Yuliya Ilchuk)
Show Notes:This week, Cameron dives into the various forces in Ukrainian literature, theory, and criticism shortly after the turn of the 20th century. To help him wrap his head around the topic. Drs. Halyna Babak and Yuliya Ilchuk join the podcast to talk about their new readers Ukrainian Literary Modernism of the 1910s to Mid-1930s, Vol. 1 &2.Buy either volume of Ukrainian Literary Modernism here (https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9798897831197/).Yuliya Ilchuk is an Associate Professor and the Director of Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Stanford University. Her first awards-winning book, Nikolai Gogol: Performing Hybrid Identity ( published by the University of Toronto Press, 2021), revises Gogol’s identity and texts as ambivalent and hybrid. Her most recent book project, The Vanished: Memory, Temporality, Identity in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine shifts the discussion from collective remembrance to the cultural dimensions of forgetting. Ilchuk has also published several translations of Ukrainian poetry and literary criticism in tandem with Amelia Glaser and by herself. Halyna Babak is an assistant professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Her research explores the intellectual history, literary theory, and literary production of 20th-century Ukraine within the broader context of Soviet and East European political and cultural history. She is the author of the monograph (in co-authorship with Alexander Dmitriev) Atlantida sovetskogo nacmodernizma. Formal'nyj metod v Ukraine (1920-e – načalo 1930-ch). (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021).This podcast is proudly A.I.-free. Any instances of intelligence are entirely human in origin.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 | PatreonSocials: Instagram | BlueSky | Twitter | FacebookQuestions, comments, threats? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
- Aug 28, 202650 min
Mosquito by Akhmet Baitursynov (with translator Jake Zawlacki)
Show Notes:This week, Jake Zawlacki joins Cameron to talk about his translation of Akhmet Baitursynov's Mosquito. Although it's appearing in English now for the first time, the collection itself is more than a century old--originally published in 1911, Mosquito is a clarion call to the Kazakh people. Living in land still subject to the Russian empire, Baitursynov's collection is a political tract, an appeal for unity, a sorrowful reflection on their world and a hopeful verse for the Kazakh future.Buy a copy of Mosquito from Academic Studies Press here (https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9798897831616/) or get it wherever you buy your books. Jake Zawlacki is a writer, translator, and scholar, and currently teaches writing at the University of San Diego. He is the editor of Conversations with Todd McFarlane and Conversations with Denys Cowan as well as the translator of the first English-language translation of Akhmet Baitursynov’s Mosquito. Zawlacki holds degrees from Louisiana State University, University of San Diego, and Stanford University, and his creative work has been published in The Saturday Evening Post, The Journal, Citron Review, and Roanoke Review.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 | FacebookQuestions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
- Aug 14, 20261h 33m
Sofia Petrova by Lydia Chukovskaya
This week, Cameron (finally) dives into Lydia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna. A novel about the Great Terror written during the Great Terror, Chukovskaya's eponymous character lives a fairly comfortable Soviet life -- until her son is arrested for an unspecified crime. Splitting its time between prison lines and a workplace growing rife with denunciations and arrests, Sofia Petrovna memorializes a moment most people would rather forget. It turns a mirror on the people who lived through the Great Terror and asks, too, "Who were you?" Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
- Jun 12, 20261h 23m
For Your Consideration: John Williams' Butcher's Crossing (and why I don't think we should compare it to Blood Meridian)
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/43017669Pragmatist 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/27117925The Influence of Jacob Boehme's Aurora on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian by Lydia R. Cooper: https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2025.2608966Aurora 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.pdfThe 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 | FacebookQuestions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
- May 3, 20261h 36m
The Last Letter (2002) by Frederick Wiseman + What Vasily Grossman and Life & Fate mean today
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 | FacebookQuestions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at slaviclitpod@gmail.com.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
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About The Slavic Literature Pod
The Slavic Literature Pod is your guide to the literary traditions in and around the Slavic world. On each episode, Cameron Lallana sits down with scholars, translators and other experts to dive deep into big books, short stories, film, and everything in between. You’ll get an approachable introduction to the scholarship and big ideas surrounding these canons.
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