I have great news! The release day of The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia was rescheduled for the 9th January 2024. It will be available earlier than expected. Christmas is coming and my book is coming too!
The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia became possible thanks to support of communities. Before writing this post, I launched a short survey asking my friends what they would like to know else about it. Most of them replied that they were interested in knowing how I built a discursive strategy for the book. This topic followed by the role of epigraphs in book chapters. And several friends were curious about what books influenced my writing style.
This monthly post discusses these issues.
What is a discursive strategy?
I would like to start with the definition. By discursive strategies, linguists Ruth Wodak and Martin Reisigl mean ‘a more or less accurate and more or less intentional plan of practices (including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a certain aim’ (2015: 585). Applying this to academic non-fiction, I rather view discursive strategies as sets of semantic, stylistic and representational decisions that authors make reflexively and situationally in the process of writing texts to achieve particular aims related to knowledge production, articulation and dissemination.
For me, building a discursive strategy about ‘ordinary people’ (in Russia and elsewhere) implies a creation of an alternative overarching frame for writing about them, as well as choosing consciously what words, phrases and expressions to use and not use when I represent research participants. This implies reflection on how turn separate stories into a coherent grand narrative about ordinary lives and struggles in contemporary societies.
The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia criticises negative and stereotypical representations of working-class people typical for dominant media and academic discourses, and especially blaming and shaming discourses about Russia’s poor that became widespread in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. In contrast to this, my book focuses on ordinary people’s everyday struggle suggesting an alternative genre of writing about them. According to the book description, this genre of writing is influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.
Why and how to use epigraphs
Using epigraphs, i.e. short quotations or sayings, in the beginning of a book, chapter or even section, can be part of the discursive strategy. With the help of epigraphs an author can not only introduce the main idea of their text to a reader, but also build the relationships with other texts from particular literary or intellectual traditions.
In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, anthropologist James Scott uses proverbs and quotations from texts written in different genres in the beginning of his book, chapters and some sections. For epigraphs, Scott prefers the extracts from plays by Euripides, Jean Genet and Václav Havel; novels by George Eliot, Onore de Balzak, George Orwell and Milan Kundera; philosophical works by Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant and Alexander Herzen; and academic non-fiction by Paul Willis, Michel de Certeau and other authors. This set of references shows that Scott is anchoring his writing in the European intellectual tradition. However, most of these authors were white men, apart from George Eliot who was a white woman.
While I was selecting epigraphs for The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to quote people who were white and black, men and women. Most of them were writing between the 19th and 20th centuries. But similarly to Scott I start one chapter on open protests with the quotation from The Suppliant Women by Euripides: ‘All our life is struggle’ – because one research participant, a trade union activist, paraphrased it in the interview.
For epigraphs in other chapters, I quoted literary theorists Valentin Vološinov and Viktor Shklovsky and writers Maxim Gorky and Victor Serge to show the inter-textual connections of my writing with the early Soviet avant-garde literary tradition. This literary tradition is characterised by experimentation and alternative representation of workers. Sociologists Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall – whose quotations I also used for epigraphs – analysed and developed avant-garde approaches.
To contextualise my writing within the feminist intellectual tradition, which my book develops further, I quoted in epigraphs such writers and public figures, as Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kolontai, Angela Davis and Kimberlé Crénshaw. They all contributed to the struggle of the oppressed for social justice and provided us with valuable writing strategies.
Books and authors that influenced my writing
I started thinking more seriously of how I was writing about workers during my PhD at Manchester, the city with a long tradition of working-class literature. To enhance my writing skills, I started reading British fiction about social classes. Novels Second Generation and Border Country by Raymond Williams influenced not only my way of thinking about writing, but also inspired me for building my discursive strategy.
Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins, academic non-fiction by sociologist and anthropologist Jeremy Morris appeared to be important for my reflection on how I can write about Russia’s workers and Russian society as a whole. Apart from inheriting critical ethnography, Morris’s writing style is situated at the intersection of British and Soviet working-class literatures.
Moreover, in Manchester, whether you want it or not, you will learn about historian E.P. Thompson, the author of The Making of the English Working Class, and writer Elizabeth Gaskell who worked with the genre of the industrial novel. I cannot help but mention Marx and Engels whose explorations of working-class people in Manchester formed the ground for their books.
At the same time, I was reading contemporary working-class writers and scholars, including a collection of essays Common People, academic books by Doreen Massey and other authors. Last but not least, I really enjoy reading Jonathan Coe, novelist from Midlands writing political satire, whose fictional characters ranging from working-class people to the elites live on the pages of his books.
The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia explains in detail the novel genre of writing that I suggest social scholars trying in their writing process.
Alexandrina Vanke 