Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies

Overview

Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic studies at Brown University specializing in contemporary Russian culture and politics, with a specific focus on the relationship between art and literature and the shaping of post-Soviet public culture. Fenghi received his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale in 2016. He grew up in Milan, Italy, where he received a B.A. and an M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from Milan State University, and spent several years of study and research in Moscow, Russia, where he was affiliated with RGGU (Russian State University for the Humanities) and MGU (Moscow State University). His first book, It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (University of Wisconsin Press: 2020), studies the ways in which the aesthetics and culture of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, a radical countercultural movement, has influenced the development of Russian protest culture and the formation of state ideology during the Putin era. The project draws on textual analysis and the discussion of ethnographic material, including over forty interviews with contemporary Russian intellectuals and political activists. Fenghi’s current book project focuses on the emergence of a specific form of “literary public sphere” in Putin’s Russia. In sharp contrast with an otherwise widespread political passivity, the Putin era in Russia has witnessed a fundamental “politicization of literature.” Radical ideologies, both left- and right-wing, have become the subject matter of novels, poems, and literary debates. Reactionary phantasmagorias have been celebrated as “contemporary art,” and major highbrow publishers have come out with entire series about theories and practices of anarchism, terrorism, and revolution. Fenghi’s book will investigate the meaning of this politicization of literature by looking at the history of a series of cultural institutions—publishing houses, literary cafés, and literary prizes. This radicalization of the cultural field in post-Soviet Russia, the book argues, reflects a more or less conscious desire to reevaluate ideology and cling on the possibility of political imagination in the aftermath of the neoliberal disaster of the 1990s. At the same time, politicized fiction and literary debates have also served as laboratories for political narratives, and they have reflected, and in many ways anticipated, larger political processes in the country. At Brown, Fenghi teaches courses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian culture, literature, and politics, Russian language, gender and sexuality, nationalism and national identity. His academic interests include: Soviet and post-Soviet literature and film; post-Soviet politics and ideological discourses; postsocialism; Russian nationalism and national identity; cultural studies; cultural anthropology; postmodernism; visual and iconographic aspects of Soviet culture.

Brown Affiliations

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