"Literature under the Influence: The Hidden Cultural History of Narcotics in Russia, 1900-2000." 0 views

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive study of Russian and Soviet drug-themed literature, tracing the representation of narcotics in fiction and the media from the late imperial period through the Soviet era and the post-Soviet (early Putin) years. Addressing a major blind spot in Russian cultural history, the project examines how narcotics function across literary, medical, legal, journalistic, and socio-political sources, revealing the historically shifting meanings attached to drugs. The study develops an original analytical framework consisting of three modes of representation: normalization, anti-normalization, and hypernormalization. These processes are used to analyze literary works that explicitly reference narcotics. Chronologically structured, the dissertation traces major transformations in Russian drug discourse across the revolution, the NEP period, Stalinism, the Thaw, glasnost’, and the post-Soviet “Wild Nineties.” Particular attention is devoted to Stalinism, where narcotics were displaced into an “invented public space” that erased social problems from official discourse while unofficial “side spaces,” including Gulag and émigré literature, preserved alternative representations of drug use. The dissertation culminates in an analysis of Vladimir Sorokin, whose prose represents the most radical articulation of hypernormalization. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that narcotics constitute a crucial cultural trope through which Russian literature negotiates power, deviance, embodiment, and unfreedom.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

English

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2026-08-02