Olga Seliazniova

Olga Seliazniova received the Kennan Institute Title VIII Summer Grant to focus on her book project “Vagrancy in Russian Culture,” in which she sets forth a comprehensive discussion of vagrancy (brodiazhnichestvo) in Russia as a historical, legal, and cultural phenomenon. As she analyzes Imperial and Soviet laws, literary texts, paintings, and films, she argues that vagrant stories produced in the nineteenth century were instrumental in shaping Russian views on freedom (“volia”) and mobility that persist even today. Her intervention problematizes the automatic pairing of svoboda and volia, which has become overused in the field of Slavic literary studies to address literature where freedom and mobility are notably absent. Instead, in her book, she shifts the focus to investigate the concept of nevolia, or unfreedom. A graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago (MA) and the University of Southern California (PhD), she has previously served as a Dean’s Postdoctoral Scholar at Florida State University. Her work appeared in the Slavic and Eastern European Journal, Forum for Modern Language Studies, and Russian Literature.