Writing on the Margins? Building the New Literary Economy in Post-Soviet Kazakhstani Russophone Literature

Abstract

This paper explores the process of building a new literary community of the younger Russian-language writers in Kazakhstan starting from the 2000s. As a response to the shortcomings of previous literary infrastructure, writers created new ways of writing and literary interactions that can be called a new literary economy. The concept of literary economy refers to the act of a new literature creating its own infrastructure and literary space, with the objective of joining the world literary space. The younger Kazakhstani authors produce a new type of literature by (re-)writing language, time and space, and in doing so they produce new bilingual, historical and spatial imagination that results in a new identity. In this process of rewriting, authors create surplus value for their works and capitalize on their particular literary and cultural identities. By ‘value’ I mean new meanings and new ways of being Russophone.

Keywords

• russophone literature
• literary economy
• kazakhstan
• post-soviet
• marginality
• literary capital
• literary time
• russian-kazakh bilingualism