Russian Montparnasse ─ Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris

This book is a case study in transnational modernist literature generated by exile, dislocation and cross-cultural exchanges, focusing on the younger writers of the interwar Russian Parisian diaspora, known as Russian Montparnasse. Maria Rubins argues that their hybrid, bicultural and bilingual narratives transcended the Russian national master narrative, anticipating more recent diasporic tendencies. The book sets the Russian Montparnasse corpus into trans-cultural and intertextual dialogues with key Western and Russian texts to demonstrate that their artistic response to the main challenges of urban modernity and cultural rupture resonated with broader aesthetic trends in interwar Europe. By systematically reassessing the role of Russian Montparnasse in the articulation of modernism, this study expands our knowledge of the evolution of the transnational literary canon, contributes to the academic debate about national vs. transnational analytical approaches to bicultural artistic production, and challenges the conventional status of language as the chief marker of literary affiliation.

Maria Rubins teaches Russian and Comparative literature at University College London, UK. She has published extensively on Russian literature, franco-Russian cultural relations, exile, Russian emigre literature, bilingual and transnational writing, and contemporary francophone fiction. She is the author of Ecphrasis in Parnasse and Acmeism: Comparative Visions of Poetry and Poetics (2000), editor of reference editions and annotated volumes of Russian emigre prose, and translator into Russian of French and English authors, including Irene Nemirovsky, Judith Gautier and Elizabeth Gaskell.