Studies in Slavic Cultures, the graduate student journal of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, is accepting papers from current graduate students for its 2012 issue. The theme of this issue is “Everyday Life.” We welcome papers on this topic, which can include interpretative (semiotic, anthropological, or sociological) approaches to the practices of everyday life in Slavic cultures as well as the analyses of representations of everyday life in different artistic media, such as literature, visual arts, and performance.

In the context of Russia and Eastern Europe, the practices and representations of everyday life have been highly contested through the processes of secularization of Slavic cultures. New secular customs, often imported as in the case of the Petrine reforms, clashed with traditional cultural norms, and led to the scrutiny and aestheticization of everyday life. The tension between the representation and transformation of daily reality was central to nineteenth-century critical realism; the ascetic practices of radical political cells also reflected a desire for transcendence of everyday life. The twentieth-century revolutionary promise of socialist utopia developed the problematization of everyday life in new directions. Modernists throughout the Slavic world imagined the transformation of private life, while post-revolutionary societies attempted to mold the everyday life of the collective. As a result, in Russia and Soviet Union, the term “byt”—often considered untranslatable—became a particularly loaded concept, a protean signifier of throwback or bourgeois habits and, in the late Soviet period, of soul-deadening collective practices like queuing. More recently, the fall of the Soviet bloc and the transition from socialist to capitalist societies have dramatically affected everyday experiences in Eastern Europe.

Possible topics on the role of everyday life in Slavic cultures include, but are not limited to:

• The rituals and mythologies of everyday life
• Everyday life and performance
• Everyday life in the period of transition,
• The transformation of the everyday life in modernism and socialist realism
• Everyday life and revolution
• Everyday life and dystopia and utopia
• Everyday life and nostalgia.

The deadline for submission is January 15, 2012.

Queries and submissions should be sent to Irina Anisimova, Natalie Ryabchikova, and Elise Thorsen at sisc@pitt.edu.