In Russian the word for \u2018border\u2019, granitsa<\/em>, carries a range of meanings which blur its definition as a territorial and administrative demarcation line. They include boundary, borderland, limit, margin, confine, threshold, littoral and frontier. The first syllable, gran\u2019, <\/em>translated as \u2018edge\u2019, also links granitsa <\/em>to a state of being \u2018on the brink\u2019.<\/p>\n Taking account of these associations, the Moscow-based journal Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie <\/em>3\/25 (New Literary Review) explores ideas about borders and boundaries in a variety of contexts: geographical, social, psychological, historical, ideological, philosophical and aesthetic.<\/p>\n Stalin ruled by the numerous maps displayed in his office, observes Evegeny Dobrenko (Ca\u2019 Foscari University of Venice) in an article on the rhetoric of kinship between the peoples of the USSR. Propaganda presented the world beyond Soviet borders as hostile and divided by national enmities, inaccessible languages and broken communication codes. Within the Soviet space, however, cultural and territorial boundaries were declared to have been erased. At the same time, the social dividing line between the nomenklatura<\/em> (ruling class) and the rest of Soviet society was camouflaged.<\/p>\n As the Stalin regime sought to implement an exclusively Soviet brand of socialism, it repackaged the Marxist notion of the brotherhood of the proletariat for domestic purposes. There were about 130 different languages in the USSR, but the \u2018rainbow of friendship\u2019 uniting its peoples was said to transcend communication barriers. Soviet territory was treated as \u2018a single acoustic space\u2019 that could absorb linguistic variation among nationalities purportedly united by shared experience and ideological commitment.<\/p>\n Shared words were seen as the route to homogeneity. Paeans to a \u2018super-language\u2019 that would wipe away linguistic differences became dominant in poetry throughout the USSR, alongside praises to \u2018the immortal beacon of Comrade Stalin\u2019 and the \u2018universal compassion of the Russian people\u2019.<\/p>\n The merging of propaganda and literature peaked during World War II as the country\u2019s external borders lost their previous stability. Any national or ethnic individuation was interpreted as dissent. The Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Sosyura\u2019s poem \u2018Love Ukraine\u2019 (1944), translated into Russian in 1951, enraged the press in Moscow. Sosyura was accused of creating a boundary where none should exist.<\/p>\n \u2018The essence of nationalism lies in the aspiration to stand apart and enclose oneself in one\u2019s own national shell, in the aspiration to see only what divides\u2019, wrote Pravda<\/em>. The Ukrainian Writers\u2019 Union was compelled to issue an immediate response declaring that, \u2018with attention and love we continue to learn the great art of literature \u2026 from Russian writers.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018The rhetoric of friendship was used to hide classic imperial practices\u2019, Dobrenko concludes. \u2018Although Soviet poetry insisted that \u201cthe friendship of peoples knows no borders\u201d, when new nations rose on the ruins of the Soviet empire, borders appeared and put an end to the friendship.\u2019<\/p>\n The ideological message that permeated and contained Soviet society created a gulf between its imagined universe and the world in which people lived and worked. In an article on the internal cultural and economic effects of the Soviet oil industry, Ilya Kalinin (visiting researcher at Humbolt University, Berlin) writes that the apparent stability of the years between the end of the Khrushchev Thaw in 1964 and glasnost <\/em>in the late 1980s \u2018hid a dynamic that was eroding the very foundation of the Soviet order\u2019.<\/p>\n Siberian oil resources kept Soviet Union afloat, but did little to serve its population. The oil, originally discovered in the 1950s and 60s, was mostly sold abroad and used by the Soviet leadership to conserve an unwieldy, ageing system and conceal technical failures, poor production, inadequate distribution and bad management. \u2018The dependence of the Soviet superstructure on oil was too significant to be acknowledged. Consequently, oil extraction<\/em> was presented as production<\/em>, hiding the truth about the industry \u2026 As economic dependence on oil grew, greater effort was put into its denial by the official economic and political narrative.\u2019 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The properties and potential of untapped oil reserves \u2013 fluidity, potential energy and an astonishing capacity for transformation \u2013 conferred on them \u2018a magical connection with affluence and the transboundary qualities of the contemporary world\u2019, Kalinin suggests. As facts about the industry were increasingly repressed, oil became culturally mythologised. It featured as a theme in poetry and, most notably, in Andrei Konchalovsky\u2019s acclaimed epic film Siberiade<\/em> (1979). Here, the oil image \u2018spins the fibres of the story, linking its broken narrative treads\u2019 against the backdrop of the Siberian space and its suppressed colonial history.<\/p>\n The region\u2019s vast, forbidding but ultimately penetrable boundaries are revealed to be less horizontal than vertical. They lie in geological strata where the bounds of time are overstepped. To dig down is to dig into the past, but it is also to release hidden stores of liquid treasure, manifest as pillars of fire reaching into the cosmos.<\/p>\n The 1970s were marked by signs of backtracking from the communist model: a greater interest in the consumer ethos, national identity, religion, folk tradition and New Age spirituality. By the end of the decade, Konchalovsky was permitted to release an epic with overtly metaphysical dimensions, representing \u2018a transgression of the normative boundaries of Soviet culture\u2019. Blending documentary with art cinema, Siberiade<\/em> combines a socialist realist style with the displaced tradition of the Russian avantgarde. Class conflict is seen through the optic of elemental forces and a search for the origins of the universe. Social identities dissolve as shared human origins are acknowledged.<\/p>\n \u2018The search for oil becomes a search for meaning,\u2019 Kalinin says. \u2018Political economy breaks into ontology\u2026 A narrative about production transgresses into a tale about the manifestation of the sacred.\u2019 Oil connects. It becomes the image of a principle that moves nature and matter, a \u2018magical operator catalysing transitions between the four elements \u2026 the final link in the chemical and symbolic processes of transmutation which absorb and transfigure organic matter from the ancient past, and the collective memory it holds\u2019.<\/p>\n In the Soviet cultural context, the line between \u2018the acceptable and the unacceptable, the establishment and the underground, was constantly in flux,\u2019 writes Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University). The consequences of crossing an ideological boundary were never predictable. Between 1955 and 1961, Andrei Sinyavsky (pseudonym Abram Tertz) wrote a series of satirical stories that earned him a seven-year prison sentence. His closed trial in 1966 \u2013 held alongside that of his fellow dissenter, Yuli Daniel \u2013 reportedly focused on the overlap between the writer\u2019s views and those of his characters.<\/p>\n Lipovetsky offers a comparison between Sinyavsky\/Tertz\u2019s Fantastic Stories<\/em> (Pantheon, 1963) and the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote slightly later. The similarities lie particularly in their views about authorship, \u2018delinquent\u2019 behaviour and panopticism. In Sinyavsky\u2019s story, \u2018Graphomaniacs\u2019 (1961), the impulse that generates an underground culture of obsessive scribbling is put down to the creative limitations imposed by the Soviet censor. \u2018Thanks to censorship\u2026we spend our lives in a fool\u2019s paradise,\u2019 one \u2018graphomaniac\u2019 says in the story. \u2018We flatter ourselves with hopes\u2026The state (curse it!) gives you the right to spend your life imagining yourself as an unacknowledged genius.\u2019<\/p>\n Within the USSR, writing was \u2018the main manifestation of agency\u2019, Lipovetsky says, though it was also \u2018paradoxically focused on an author\u2019s withdrawal, which fulfilled the philosophical aspiration to overstep one\u2019s own existence and move into an alternative (transcendental) dimension\u2019. In the Soviet Union, the production of transgressive literary texts was seen as a form of social \u2018delinquency\u2019.<\/p>\n Sinyavsky depicts the compulsion to write as a release of suppressed energy combined with an urge to \u2018eliminate\u2019 the self in the creation of a text. Foucault expresses a similar thought in a 1969 lecture, remarking that a writer creates a space in which he constantly disappears, playing \u2018the part of a dead man in the game of writing\u2019. Equally, for Foucault, any disciplinary system incites the urge to cross its boundaries. At a systemic level, external social control penetrates individual consciousness and works to impose its own \u2018truth\u2019 on the personality. The internalized sense of surveillance it provokes can lead to a \u2018delinquent\u2019 reaction.<\/p>\n Within the Soviet system, which cultivated an illusion of panoptical omniscience, the officially recognised writer was a central functionary, while the unpublished scribbler emerged as his \u2018delinquent double\u2019. Sinyavsky devises an author who is \u2018radically powerless but liberated into a liminal space inhabited by the marginalised and the excluded\u2019, Lipovetsky writes.<\/p>\n The story Pkhents <\/em>(1957) gradually unmasks a narrator who appears successively as a hunchback, a figure of mixed ethnicity, as homosexual, a migrant, a spy and ultimately an extraterrestrial. Sinyavsky\u2019s hero is free of conventional identity. When Pkhents commits suicide, for fear of losing his essential self through assimilation into the human race, he shakes off the limits of standard perspective and perceives himself \u2018from all sides, all angles at once\u2019. The alien represents Syniavsky\u2019s \u2018prototype of the ideal author\u2019, Lipovetsky suggests, \u2018endowed with a gift of absolute disengagement, which is the foundation of literary creativity\u2019.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Mockup_NLO-1-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\nErasing boundaries<\/h2>\n
Metaphysics of oil<\/h2>\n
Discipline and delinquency<\/h2>\n