This lecture will look into the promotion and celebration of the epic poem The Kalevala by the Soviet government with a focus on the Stalinist period. By selectively promoting epic poetry and other pre-Bolshevik landmarks of literature, the Soviet regime aimed to achieve politically and ideologically oriented objectives in reinforcing the national identity of Soviet ethno-national territorial entities, indoctrinating the population, universalizing Marxist-Leninist values, and, in some cases, serving the regime’s geopolitical ambitions. To better illustrate the Soviet authorities’ methodology in celebrating national literary icons and shed light on the pervasiveness of the Soviet policy of literary monumentalization in geopolitically sensitive border regions, the lecture will examine the Soviet approach to The Kalevala — an epic poem based on Karelian folklore compiled by the Finnish polymath Elias Lönnrot in the first half of the nineteenth century. By analyzing the changing ethno-national designation of The Kalevala by the Soviet authorities and situating the Soviet government’s shifting attitude toward The Kalevala in the historical and socio-political context, the lecture will underscore how the official approach to The Kalevala mirrored not only the shifting priorities of the implementation of the Soviet nationality, language, and cultural policy in a strategically sensitive border region but also the changing geopolitical calculations in the Soviet Union’s relations with neighboring Finland
Diego Benning Wang is a historian of the Caucasus, Armenia, Central Asia, and the Russian North in the modern period. He received a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, an M.A. in Russian Studies from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Russian Studies from New York University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He has previously been a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies at Columbia University and has taught at Princeton University, Kean University, and Union County College.