Le poète arménien Yéghiché Tcharents (1897-1937) devient victime des répressions staliniennes des années 30. Tcharents est déjà un poète connu lorsque la révolution éclate en Russie. Il voit dans la révolution le sauveur de son peuple au destin tragique. Il croit aux idéaux humanistes de Lénine comme beaucoup de ses contemporains. Cependant, le pouvoir totalitaire de Staline change son regard politique. Sa poésie reflète ses inquiétudes. En 1933, le recueil de poèmes Livre du chemin, un compte-rendu de sa vision poétique de la construction de la nouvelle société, ainsi que de l’éducation de l’homme soviétique, est censuré. Il est publié à nouveau avec des modifications. Tcharents, le poète de tous les combats, ne parvient pas à cacher son désaccord, sa désillusion vis-à-vis du pouvoir politique. Il témoigne à travers sa poésie. Le système répressif ne le laisse plus en paix. Il est inculpé comme contre-révolutionnaire, trotskiste, nationaliste, terroriste. En juillet 1936, il est assigné à résidence. La poésie demeure l’unique espace où il pense et écrit librement. Malade et conscient de l’imminence de sa mort, il survit grâce à sa poésie, dans son univers de visions. L’argumentation de la thèse est construite sur l’analyse littéraire des textes du corpus : le Livre du chemin et les textes poétiques de 1935 à 1937 de Tcharents. Une étude concise du contexte historico-politique de sa poésie et une analyse littéraire de son œuvre avant 1933 sont aussi proposées, permettant de mieux percevoir la complexité des relations entre le poète-individu et son époque, et enfin, de réunir tous les éléments nécessaires de traduction faisant partie de l’objectif de cette étude doctorale. / The Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937) becomes victim of Stalin’s repressions in the Thirties. Charents is already known as a poet when the revolution bursts in Russia. He sees in the revolution the saver of his people with the tragic destiny. Like many of his contemporaries he believes in the humanistic ideals of Lenin. However, the totalitarian power of Stalin changes his political views. His poetry reflects his concerns. In 1933, the collection of poems Book of the way, a report of his poetic vision of the new society, as well as the education of the Soviet man, is censored. It is published with changes. Charents, the poet actively involved in a number of social issues, cannot hide his dissension and disillusion with respect to the political power. He bespeaks through his poetry. The repressive system does not leave him any more in peace. He is accused of being a contra-revolutionist, trotskyist, nationalist, terrorist. In July 1936, he is put under house arrest. Poetry remains the sole space where he thinks and writes freely. Ill and aware of the imminence of his death, he survives in his universe of visions thanks to his poetry.The argumentation of this doctoral thesis is built on the literary analysis of the texts in the corpus: the Book of the way and the poetic texts of 1935 to 1937. A concise study of the historical-political context of his poetry and a literary analysis of his work before 1933 are also proposed. This allows to better perceive the complexity of the relations between the poet-individual and his time and, finally joins all the elements necessary for the translation, which is an objective of this doctoral study.

Le poète arménien Yéghiché Tcharents (1897-1937) devient victime des répressions staliniennes des années 30. Tcharents est déjà un poète connu lorsque la révolution éclate en Russie. Il voit dans la révolution le sauveur de son peuple au destin tragique. Il croit aux idéaux humanistes de Lénine comme beaucoup de ses contemporains. Cependant, le pouvoir totalitaire de Staline change son regard politique. Sa poésie reflète ses inquiétudes. En 1933, le recueil de poèmes Livre du chemin, un compte-rendu de sa vision poétique de la construction de la nouvelle société, ainsi que de l’éducation de l’homme soviétique, est censuré. Il est publié à nouveau avec des modifications. Tcharents, le poète de tous les combats, ne parvient pas à cacher son désaccord, sa désillusion vis-à-vis du pouvoir politique. Il témoigne à travers sa poésie. Le système répressif ne le laisse plus en paix. Il est inculpé comme contre-révolutionnaire, trotskiste, nationaliste, terroriste. En juillet 1936, il est assigné à résidence. La poésie demeure l’unique espace où il pense et écrit librement. Malade et conscient de l’imminence de sa mort, il survit grâce à sa poésie, dans son univers de visions. L’argumentation de la thèse est construite sur l’analyse littéraire des textes du corpus : le Livre du chemin et les textes poétiques de 1935 à 1937 de Tcharents. Une étude concise du contexte historico-politique de sa poésie et une analyse littéraire de son œuvre avant 1933 sont aussi proposées, permettant de mieux percevoir la complexité des relations entre le poète-individu et son époque, et enfin, de réunir tous les éléments nécessaires de traduction faisant partie de l’objectif de cette étude doctorale. / The Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937) becomes victim of Stalin’s repressions in the Thirties. Charents is already known as a poet when the revolution bursts in Russia. He sees in the revolution the saver of his people with the tragic destiny. Like many of his contemporaries he believes in the humanistic ideals of Lenin. However, the totalitarian power of Stalin changes his political views. His poetry reflects his concerns. In 1933, the collection of poems Book of the way, a report of his poetic vision of the new society, as well as the education of the Soviet man, is censored. It is published with changes. Charents, the poet actively involved in a number of social issues, cannot hide his dissension and disillusion with respect to the political power. He bespeaks through his poetry. The repressive system does not leave him any more in peace. He is accused of being a contra-revolutionist, trotskyist, nationalist, terrorist. In July 1936, he is put under house arrest. Poetry remains the sole space where he thinks and writes freely. Ill and aware of the imminence of his death, he survives in his universe of visions thanks to his poetry.The argumentation of this doctoral thesis is built on the literary analysis of the texts in the corpus: the Book of the way and the poetic texts of 1935 to 1937. A concise study of the historical-political context of his poetry and a literary analysis of his work before 1933 are also proposed. This allows to better perceive the complexity of the relations between the poet-individual and his time and, finally joins all the elements necessary for the translation, which is an objective of this doctoral study.

This dissertation establishes a category of early Soviet “exodic” literature, which consists of works published in Yiddish or Russian between 1917 and 1935. Reading together texts by Peretz Markish, Andrei Platonov, Moyshe Kulbak, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Yiddish texts are placed on equal footing with Russian texts to underscore the singular role of Jews in the early Soviet period and demonstrate shared anxieties and practices of resistance to hegemony among groups seemingly separated by language and culture. These anxieties and modes of resistance are what make the Soviet exodic a literature of revolution as it grapples with the complexity of the Soviet period and Soviet identity formation. Drawing upon political theorist Michael Walzer and his text Exodus and Revolution as well as the critical response from Edward Said, this dissertation uses the biblical book of Exodus as a theoretical matrix for the identification and elaboration of narrative sequences and thematic material that constitute a revolutionary genre and applies it to the study of early Soviet literature. Because they are written and published between 1917 and 1935, exodic texts are positioned between the Bolshevik Revolution and the crystallization of high Stalinism. Therefore, they are situated within what is commonly known as the “interwar period.” Such a definition relies upon absence (the absence of war). The Soviet exodic provides this historical moment and its attending texts a positive definition in deference to the revolutionary framework that guides it. This dissertation also considers how the texts enact revolution with the help of critical and queer theory, most notably Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Mary Rubenstein’s Pantheologies. These theoretical supports serve to articulate the various queer—that is, non-normative—ways that the selected texts engage pluralism to resist ideological regimes and forces of control as they re-evaluate social and political categories and norms. Queer theory also serves to express the entanglement of self, other, and place, and in so doing, brings ecological anxieties to the fore. Resistance in the Soviet exodic thus takes shape through the queering or misalignment of categories like space, language, or gender performance, and culminates in the figure of the Soviet trickster, who, by means of their unfinalizability, is the embodiment of revolution.

This dissertation examines Soviet and Polish science fiction from the 1960s to 1980s as a political genre that investigates power and society. The problem of alterity is central for this genre: it is ungovernable because it is incomprehensible. Science fiction of this kind explores the possibilities and impossibilities of living with the Other that can impact social organization dramatically and lethally while that Other cannot be impacted in return. Living peacefully with such alterity is the fundamental premise of pluralism as a principle of social organization, according to the conclusions of the study. The dissertation explores alterity in science fiction by Ivan Efremov (1908–1972), Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1925–1991 and 1933–2012), Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), and Volodymyr Savchenko (1933–2005). My goal is to reveal in their works a transformative epistemological shift that had manifested itself through the tropes of alterity. Among these tropes the dissertation highlights aliens and alien civilizations, artificial intelligence, anisotropic universe, distant planets endowed with unique natural attributes, the more abstract unknown, and non-human elements running out-of-control within human species. I also examine specifically science-fictional notions such as the bull and progressor, which represent the intelligentsia’s relations with power and the masses. The analyzed literary worlds also represent their authors’ views of alternative societal organization, ruled by the powerful alterity such as a mega-computer or alien super-intelligence. Another important trope of alterity is based upon a simultaneous performance of contradictory competing logics that create an effect known as parallax: the reader may interpret the same characters and/or stories in multiple, mutually incompatible, ways. Beyond avoiding censorship, these tropes set the stage for the authors’ utopias, in which the Other appears as an impenetrable alterity that affects those who encounter it. For these writers, alterity serves as the tool for problematizing progress, as it was imagined after World War II by the majority of political elites under socialism and in the West. I suggest that their science fiction contributed, among many other factors, to the lexicon and the imaginary of a cohort of political dissidents and Communist Party functionaries alike who translated science-fictional themes into political science terms to shape Perestroika’s discourse. The dissertation, thus, establishes a historical connection between Soviet and Polish science fiction of the post-Stalin period and the ways in which democracy was discursively constructed in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and other former socialist nations.

This dissertation argues that Russia’s confrontation with modernity generated a series of sociocultural paradigm crises that gave rise to a modernist grotesque aesthetic tradition, uniting over forty years of artistic production into a coherent literary movement. While close reading the work of Fyodor Sologub (The Petty Demon [Мелкий бес]), Andrei Bely (Petersburg [Петербург]), Evgenii Zamyatin (At World’s End [На куличках]), and Velimir Khlebnikov (“The Crane” [Журавль]), I argue that prerevolutionary modernist writers utilized grotesque modes of representation to depict a world where the former cornerstones of pre-modern Russian identity are fracturing under the pressures of modernity. In contrast to extant scholarship, I argue the 1917 Revolution is not a fundamental break in Russia’s experience of the crisis of modernity, but an extension, and an exacerbation of it. Though discourses of Russian identity formation will be rapidly recodified around the Soviet project, the same underlying grotesque aesthetic devices used by pre-revolutionary authors are taken up by a new generation of Soviet-era modernists. Mikhail Zoshchenko’s parody in Michel Sinyagin (Мишель Синягин) elicits skepticism about yesterday’s unenlightened masses becoming today’s new Tolstoys. Andrei Platonov’s anomalous depictions of the Russian periphery in his Juvenile Sea (Ювенильное море) are still inhabited by monsters, too far from Soviet nodes of power to be assimilated into the national ideological project. And Konstantin Vaginov (in the novel Goat Song [Козлиная песнь]) and Evgenii Shvarts (in the play The Shadow [Тень]) capture the prevalence of superfluous intellectuals with ruptured psyches, frustrated by their unsuccessful attempts to adapt to the new Soviet reality.