Please join the Harriman Institute for a Director’s Seminar with Nathan Goldstone. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.
Between 1989 and 1991, the antinuclear protest movement Nevada-Semipalatinsk played a significant role in ending the Soviet nuclear weapons testing program in Kazakhstan, setting the republic-cum-nation on a path toward a denuclearized post-Soviet future. Founded by the poet Olzhas Suleimenov and orchestrated from his office in the House the Writers, Nevada-Semipalatinsk attracted support from many of Kazakhstan’s leading writers, artists, journalists, and filmmakers. Yet the movement remains little explored as a phenomenon of cultural production, even amid burgeoning scholarly interest in Kazakhstan’s nuclear and antinuclear histories. This talk considers Nevada-Semipalatinsk’s origins in postcolonial literature, its chief documentarian’s aesthetic ambitions, and its legacy in Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet literary canon. If the movement’s political achievements are well documented, its cultural influence remains incompletely acknowledged.
Nathan Goldstone is a scholar of Russophone literature from Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the South Caucasus region. His dissertation “Reframing Russophonia: Reflections of Nation, Land, and Self” examined how Russophone cultural production has participated in national identity formation in late Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, with case studies that incorporate several interdisciplinary frameworks, including ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, and nuclear humanities. His work has appeared in the Tolstoy Studies Journal and the Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel. He holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University, an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Russian from Middlebury College.
