Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University specializing in contemporary Russian culture and politics, with a 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, tentatively entitled The Revolution Will Be Fictionalized: Postmodern Politics and Radical Literature in Putin’s Russia, focuses on the shaping of a specific kind of literary public sphere in Putin’s Russia. In contrast with an otherwise widespread depoliticization of society, the Putin era has witnessed a fundamental politicization of literature and literary institutions. 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. Critics have debated political correctness, called each other fascists, and come out as “black-hundredists” (a term associated with the most brutal forms of ultranationalism and obscurantism). Most recently, the invasion of Ukraine has produced a renewed state of emergency, in which writers and public intellectuals are persecuted and declared foreign agents not just for expressing themselves against the war, but for not expressing their support for it. And questions are raised, both in Russia and globally, on whether more or less canonical authors may be instrumental to Russian imperialism. Drawing on textual analysis and on ethnographic research to be conducted online in Russia and on site in Germany, Latvia, and Georgia, Fenghi’s project investigates the meanings of this radicalization of the cultural field—which, the book argues, reflects a more or less conscious desire to reevaluate ideology and cling to the possibility of political imagination in the aftermath of the neoliberal disaster of the 1990s. At the same time, the book explains how politicized fiction and literary debates have served as laboratories for political narratives and have reflected, and in many ways foretold, larger political processes in Russia and beyond.
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.
