Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 17, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Anastasia de La Fortelle. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
Anastasia de La Fortelle proposes a new interpretation of Serhiy Zhadan’s poetics, illuminating underexplored spatial configurations of post-Soviet cultural memory. Critical readings of Serhiy Zhadan’s fiction have already emphasized its construction of nomadic subjectivity as both a form of resistance to the State (Deleuze and Guattari) and a strategy for overcoming the immobilization of melancholic subjectivity (Benjamin). Building upon these interpretations, de la Fortelle shifts focus to the concrete mechanisms through which nomadic subjectivity negotiates its relationship to the space.
De La Fortelle examines the nexus of traumatic experiences and spatiality in Serhiy Zhadan’s prose, specifically “Voroshilovgrad” and “The Orphanage” – works whose protagonists are perpetually in transit – through the lens of Marc Augé’s concept of “non-place” within a broader mnemotopological framework. Drawing upon Augé’s anthropology of supermodernity, she argues that Zhadan’s literary texts transform non-spaces of into loci of traumatic inscription and memory work through processes of systematic de/re-semiotization.
Anastasia de La Fortelle is professor of Russian literature and culture at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Her research focuses on contemporary Russian literature as well as French-Russian literary interactions during the Symbolist period. She is the author of two monographs: “The Adventures of the Poetic Subject. Russian Symbolism Facing French Poetry: Complicity or Opposition?” and “The Space of Marginality in Contemporary Russian Literature,” and has published numerous articles on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Russian culture. She is also the founder and editor of the scholarly series Studia Slavica Lausannensia and Memoria et Historia. Her current research examines questions of memory and oblivion in post-Soviet literature.
