Call for papers No. 31 – Open topic papers and for the Dossier "Russian literature and poverty"

In addition to the free theme works, which RUS receives on a continuous basis for its issues, No. 31 will also receive articles and essays related to the studies of Russian literature and poverty until August 30, 2026.

Poverty is a central theme in Russian literature. One need only to think of the importance of literary types that, since the short novel Poor Liza, by Karamzin, have populated Russian Realism, initiating to a tradition that extended from 19th-century literature to Soviet Realism, in which Gorky emerges as the "model artist of vagabonds, outcasts and the wretched". The multitude of petty officials and serfs who inhabited the basements of St. Petersburg and the peasant izbas – whose representation in Russian and Soviet Realism transcends the reality of the soul and bourgeois passions – elevated the experience of poverty to an essential category of Russian poetics. The “poor in spirit”, from Akaki Akakievich to Prince Myshkin, is a central type in the Russian novel, whether as a reflection of Christian Realism or as an expression of a national element with no Western equivalents.

Hence the call for papers of  this Dossier, which intends not only to explore the various horizons of thematization of the experience of poverty in Russian and Soviet Realism, but also to investigate its relationship with historical and sociocultural phenomena that are determinant for Russian literature and culture, such as religion, Nihilism, violence, utopia and revolution.

 

 RUS accepts works written in Portuguese, English, Russian, Spanish, French or Italian.

Submission of texts: up to 30/08/2026.

Dossier organizers: Jimmy Sudario Cabral and Gérard Bensussan