Join us for Margaret Litvin’s talk “Arab Writers and the Russian Girlfriend Fantasy”. The talk is presented as part of the Slavic colloquium series.
This talk draws on Litvin’s completed book manuscript, Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance. Exploring the subgenre that fits into both the Soviet obshchiaga (dorm) novel and the Arabic travel writing tradition, the talk will identify the Russian Girlfriend Fantasy, a feminine literary archetype often repeated and later mocked in Arabic literature set in the Soviet Union. This character, different from Arab writers’ portrayal of Western European women, arguably responds not only to Arab writers’ readings of 19th century Russian literature but also to their contacts with real-life Soviet women who sought to embody that internalized literary archetype.
Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University. A historian of transregional cultural flows, she is the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, 2011) and is completing a monograph on the literary legacies of Arab-Soviet ties. She has translated Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Ice (Seagull, 2019) and, with historians Eileen Kane and Masha Kirasirova, co-edited the 400-page anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford, 2023). Her research and literary translations have been recognized with Mellon, ACLS Burkhardt, Humboldt, and Radcliffe fellowships and a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Award to translate Khalil Alrez’s The Russian Quarter, a Syrian civil war novel featuring a giraffe.
It is sponsored by the generosity of the Edward J. and Dorothy Kempf Memorial Fund and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale.