Did Arctic/Siberian Indigenous literacy history truly begin with the “introduction” of alphabetic writing by Russian missionaries and Soviet modernizers? This paper challenges that assumption by analyzing the cultures of non-alphabetic writing—specifically, the ideographic and pictographic signs and texts historically and contemporarily prevalent among Indigenous communities across Siberia and the Arctic. We focus particularly on the writing practices of Nenets, an Indigenous Samoyedic group in northern Eurasia, examining their use of signs, drawings, and various text forms. Reflecting on this history, we demonstrate how these practices are “trans-indigenous,” in Chadwick Allen’s terms, and how they have resisted various forms of colonial dominance while continuing to manifest in Indigenous everyday life. The paper is based on the authors’ analysis of Indigenous novels, archival, and field materials.

Dmitry "Dima" Arzyutov, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. His research and teaching focus on Siberian and Arctic Indigenous ethnohistory, Indigenous literatures, environmental and nuclear histories, and the history of anthropological knowledge. He is the author of numerous journal articles and edited collections published in Current Anthropology, History and Anthropology, The British Journal for the History of Science, Visual Anthropology, Settler Colonial Studies, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, and others. He is currently finalizing his first monograph, The Northern Book of Origins: Siberian Indigenous Narratives and Metropolitan Ethnogenesis Theories, under contract with University of Nebraska Press.

Laura Siragusa, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the Ohio State University. Siragusa is a linguistic anthropologist whose work examines verbal, written, and embodied communication as it adapts to changing ecologies. Her research focuses on language revitalization, the materiality of language, and human–environment relationships, with particular attention to emerging communicative practices and folkloric genres. Centered on the European/Russian Arctic, her work draws on long-term ethnographic and archival methods and close collaboration with Indigenous communities. Her monograph Promoting Heritage Language in Northwest Russia was published by Routledge in 2017, and her research has appeared in Current Anthropology, Multilingua, and Anthropologica. She is co-editing a two-volume collection of Franz Boas’s correspondence with Russian/Soviet scholars, forthcoming in 2026.

This article analyzes the first Russian Gothic fiction, “The Island of Bornholm” (1793), written by Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), who associated Gothic characters’ visual perception with that of the audience in the shadow play, specifically the “Chinese shadow,” as well as that of prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave. It investigates the way in which Karamzin reshapes Plato’s cave with Gothic trappings after his visual experience of Chinese Shadows, a popular shadow puppet theater in Paris. I claim that Karamzin poses an epistemological question as to the truthfulness of our perception by using the interplay of light and darkness of Gothic aesthetics, thus creating tension between the known and the unknown. To support this claim, I analyze Karamzin’s use of the Gothic dim light, which blurs the protagonist’s sight and projects illusory images that cast doubt over what has been observed by the character. Fur- thermore, by taking into account that the protagonist is not involved in the tragic event on Bornholm but rather merely observes it as a foreign spectator, I distinguish the protagonist from the other contemporary European Gothic heroes involved in the events. The protagonist’s distinctive visual perception and role as a spectator reveal the feature of Russian Gothic character’s vision that Karamzin understands: a reinterpretation of Plato’s epistemological concerns found in his cave allegory, coupled with the evolution of visual entertainments. Finally, by highlighting the fact that even contemporary readers are curious about the aftermath of the story, I argue that readers of “The Island” are also on a search for truth, that is to say, an ongoing epistemological play created by Karamzin.

Jiyoung Hong is a lecturer in the Department of Russian Language and Literature at Yonsei University and Seoul National University. She received her doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University. Her research focuses on epistemological issues in Russian Gothic literature, with particular attention to the influence of late- eighteenth- and mid-nineteenth-century visual technology and culture. Her additional interests include the narrative strategies of Russian psychological fantastic literature, especially as exemplified by Vladimir Odoevsky, and their influence on self-consciousness in Russian realist fiction.

Leo Tolstoy’s early diaries have long been understood to be a staging ground for the style of his earliest fictional works, but these journals also gradually acquire a discrete form of their own. This article traces this diaristic style’s evolution over the course of the 1850s, and argues that one of its major motivations is Tolstoy’s attempt to textually represent his quotidian, bodily sensations. His earliest diaries meticulously record instances of illness, sexual desire, and semi-conscious impressions in a frustrated attempt to analyze and regulate his body; as this continues to fail, his diaristic style acquires a more terse, immediate style that better captures the incomprehensibility of bodily sensation. This style, moreover, begins to inform Tolstoy’s fiction, although when transferred to published prose, it functions to represent intense shock instead of quotidian experience.

Gabriel Nussbaum is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. His dissertation analyzes a Russian “state gothic,” which synthesizes Gothic literary tropes and the machinations of a malevolent state apparatus. His other research interests include ego-documents, theories of parody, and the process of stylistic inheritance.

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–89) is often classified as a social realist and positioning him as a late romantic figure was seen as an attempt to diminish the socio-political impact of his novels. This classification, however, hinders a comprehensive understanding of the complex kaleidoscope of mutually enhancing and mutually contradicting viewpoints, as well as in the ambiguous gaps and distances between each voice that persist even in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s late novel The History of a Town (1870). This article examines Saltykov-Shchedrin’s narrative strategy using the term “literary ventriloquism”—a rhetorical technique that involves a dialogue between deviant and conventional narration and an ostensible fight for supremacy in narration. I contend that the distinctive forms of heteroglossia found in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel The History of a Town can trace its origin back to his early romantic passion, to its “literary ventriloquism.” This technique of framing and employing fantastical storytelling elements while remaining in the realist convention allows Saltykov- Shchedrin to bridge the seemingly disparate epistemological concerns of Russian romanticism and Russian realism. This amalgam of romantic techniques and realistic ends makes Saltykov-Shchedrin’s work a representative of a new realism, which is fundamentally rooted in epistemological pluralism.

Byungsam Jung is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, with additional comparative interests across visual culture and the history of photography. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, Thoughtography: Picturing Artistic Objectivity in Russian Metafiction, which examines the intersections of literary form, visual imagination, and authorial self- representation. He recently received a Hansae-Yes24 Foundation Research Grant in support of his project on artistic protest in Russia

In Evgenii Zamiatin’s 1924 novel We, gender is one of the main vehicles for challenging the dystopian One State. The characters O-90, I-330, and eventually D-503 defy what I identify as the One State’s hegemonic masculinity, which legitimizes one form of masculinity based on the denigration of feminine and non-traditional masculine identities. D-503 voices the State’s misogynistic beliefs, but Zamiatin presents such scenes in ways that encourage readers to interpret his comments critically. Misogyny works as a device to distinguish between propaganda and reality. For example, D-503’s idea of femininity proves to be an arbitrary substitute for qualities the State wishes to suppress. The One State’s gender ideology thus operates as a system of power meant to force its citizens to conform with its values. Characters’ play with gender supports a spectrum of personal expression that facilitates creative exploration and political action. In this paper, I reinterpret O-90’s desire for a baby as a radical act of resistance against the State that tries to control her body. I demonstrate how I-330 utilizes gender as a performance meant to provide an alternative to the One State’s gender ideology. Finally, I examine how D-503 discovers his individuality and political agency through his evolving experience of gender, expressed through his sexual relationship with I-330 and becoming a metaphorical mother to his text–a journey which parallels O-90’s.

Kelly Gallagher is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Lan- guages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. She received her MA from Ohio State and her BA from the College of the Holy Cross. Her research interests include Russian modernist literature, gender and sexuality studies, nineteenth-century Russophone women’s literature, and East European theatre.