Literature & Literary Studies
May 2026
Russo-Soviet imperialist hauntings
Neo-Gothic geographies in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989
by Svitlana Krys, Maryna Romanets
Russo-Soviet imperialist hauntings attempts to capture some of the ghosts of the colonial and totalitarian past that have been proliferating in international political and cultural landscapes after the collapse of the USSR. By conflating postcolonial, post-totalitarian, postcommunist, and Gothic discourses, it maps virtually untouched aspects of cultural decolonization, focusing on unsettling "hauntings" of unresolved memory traces of Russo-Soviet domination in the former Eastern Bloc countries and Soviet republics. Operating within a vast intertextual field of social, cultural, and ideological discourses, the volume enables a productive exchange across distinct (inter)disciplinary boundaries and represents a range of voices from Europe and North America. The contributors' diverse interests draw on transmedia (literature, visual arts, and film), transnational, and translingual (diasporic literature) approaches, providing insights into a variety of forms that the Gothic has taken in the (late) twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and demonstrating its consistent engagement with history, ideology, and politics.
