Russia maggiore/minore/altra

Russia: Major / Minor / Other Over the centuries, within the flexible and dialectic space of Eastern Europe, it is possible to recognize 'major' and 'minor' cultural, linguistic, and political entities, shifting roles and positions. The perspective of the 'foreign' scholar can contribute to build a 'minor' vision of the culture he/she investigates (whether it is placed in the dominant or subordinate space within the general background of a given historical moment). Russia, a frontier territory without the characteristics of the frontier, is characterized by permeable borders, in which two distinct series of “centricity” coexist and intersect: individual and collective; in so doing, they assign to the country the quality of an empire that is both marginal and central.In this perspective, the relationship with history and memory (one's own and that of others) is essential. For the artist (and the inhabitant) of ‘minor’ Russia, this relationship is complex, because he/she is always the inheritor of his/her own painful and traumatic past. In fact, he/she cannot ignore to be a grain (albeit oppressed and trampled, rebellious or exiled) of the ‘major’ Russia, of its state mechanism, of its political and ideological condition. In the existential and creative journey of writers who describe their country, imaginary and real, moving between different worlds, languages, regimes, colors, one can perhaps recognize the multifaceted face of a greater, dominant, authoritarian, violent, short-sighted Russia, that is at the same time minor, peripheral, exiled (inside and outside its borders), oppressed, estranged and extra-located. The field of research, therefore, must be placed on the threshold of the ‘many Russias’, in the space between hegemonic and marginal phenomena.