Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, literature has flourished as a platform for exploring what it means to be post-Soviet, or post-colonial. My forthcoming book Postcolonial Identities in Central Asian and Caucasian Literature (OUP) examines this question through stories of collective memory, trauma, immigration, posthumanism, and sci-fi utopianism, among others.

One finds great heterogeneity within these stories, whether linguistic, stylistic, or formal. Nevertheless, all authors seek to uncover, to some extent, the traumas and taboos of the Soviet period. In her memoir The Dancer from Khiva (2004), Uzbek author Bibish recounts local women and children’s labour in Soviet Uzbek cotton farms to ship cotton to Moscow. Later, when emigrating to Moscow, Bibish and her family encounter severe racism, pointing at the overlooked prevalence of race in Soviet ideology. Nana Ekvtimishvili’s poignant novel The Pear Field (2015) depicts the harsh life of orphans in post-Soviet Tbilisi, Georgia, as the manifestation of the intangible legacies of the Soviet order, steeped in corruption, secrecy and survivalism. A personal favourite is Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance (2012), simultaneously set during the Great Game and the Soviet era. At the same time, there is a great deal of humour in these works. In her novel The Fund of Last Hope: A Postcolonial Novel (2013), Kazakh author Lilya Kalaus imagines a fictional country Burkutstan, a hilarious caricature of postcolonial Kazakhstan. In her autobiographic novel Foreigner (2011), Armenian author Narine Abgaryan tells humours anecdotes of miscommunications between local Russians, Caucasian migrants and Western tourists at hotel Intourist, Moscow– a microcosm of post-Soviet Russia’s bumpy transition to capitalism.

My current book, Post-Soviet Ecopoetics examines how creative artists address the legacies of Soviet environmental exploitation in their fiction. In Siberia, the extraction of natural resources (such as oil and gas) since Soviet times has been threating local nature and traditional lifestyle (such as reindeer-herding) of indigenous peoples, as explored by Siberian author Eremei Aipin. In Central Asia, Soviet cotton monoculture caused the near-disappearance of the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, as evoked in Zhanna Issabaeva’s haunting film Bopem (2015). In Kazakhstan, the Soviets carried out devastating nuclear explosions between 1945-1989 to catch-up with the United States in the nuclear race, as evoked in Hamid Ismailov’s novel The Dead Lake (2015), a poetic tale of Erzhan, a musical prodigy trapped in a child’s body after his swim in a radioactive lake. Yet, these nuanced works avoid reducing their protagonists to victims of villainous colonisers, for example through exploring questions of accountability, and even some rare traces of Communist nostalgia.

Fictional works from the Caucasus and Central Asia should be ranked alongside the great examples of postcolonial writing, and I hope more readers explore their unique charm, depth and variety.