Ellen Rutten studied Russian literature at the Universities of Groningen, St. Petersburg and Berlin (Humboldt). She was affiliated as lecturer to Amsterdam and Leiden Universities, and a research associate at the University of Cambridge for the project Reclaiming the Reader: New Sincere Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature. From 2009 onwards, she will be involved in the Bergen-based project The Future of Russian: Language Culture in the Era of New Technology. Rutten's work appeared in The Slavonic & East European Review, Osteuropa, and the Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, among others. Her monograph Unattainable Bride Russia: Gendering Nation, State & Intelligentsia in Russian Intellectual Culture is due for publication at Northwestern University Press.
After the presidential elections of March 2008, Russia's most prominent literary bloggers wrote about anything but those elections. What explains the lack of discussion about this pivotal political event in literary blogs - blogs which did become a vehicle for political expression a few months later, at the time of the Russo-Georgian war? Juxtaposing posts by seven Russian literary bloggers, I argue that the political silence of March 2008 is not motivated by a disinterest in politics, fear of censorship, or lack of audience demand. Rather does it deflate the myth of Russian literature as a vehicle for political debate - and prove that, as elsewhere, in Russia sometimes writers long to be "more than writers", while at other times, they do not. Because of its here-and-now character, it is the blog - more so than paper publications - which shows that a generalizing claim of this kind is principally erratic.
Associated links:
Ellen Rutten
Language of contribution: English
Download the pdf