Philip Gleissner 0:02 As you can imagine, writing a volume about the pandemic during the pandemic was somewhat complicated, and I think there was a lot of rewriting involved, or I know for a fact there was a lot of rewriting involved. Eva Dale 0:17 From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now. David Staley 0:53 I'm pleased to be joined today in the ASC Tech Studios by Philip Gleissner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic East European Languages and Cultures, the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. He specializes in the cultures and literatures of socialist Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on print media in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic, called East Germany. He's particularly interested in media as agents of mobility, and I definitely want to ask him more about what that means. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Gleissner. Philip Gleissner 1:27 Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. David Staley 1:29 Well, I'd like to start with the monograph that you're working on right now: "Soviet Circulations: A History of the Socialist Literary Journal". Maybe start with a definition; when you say you're studying the socialist literary journal, what is it that we're talking about? Philip Gleissner 1:43 Yeah, I understand this may be fairly obscure, right? Who talks about literary journals, who cares about literary journals? David Staley 1:49 You do! Philip Gleissner 1:49 What literary journals are you subscribed to? And it is a really interesting part of socialist culture, and by socialist culture, I mean the cultures of state socialism that... especially in the Soviet Union since the 1920s, but then after the Second World War, also in the rest of Eastern Europe, because this was really a cultural model that was exported to other countries. So, the interesting thing is, in the Soviet Union, the goal was for most of the population to be avid readers, to be educated citizens. And part, an important role in this was played by literature, and one of the major delivery mechanisms for literature, novels, and poetry and whatnot, were these literary journals that truly had print runs, they had circulation in between hundreds of thousands - this is in the 1960s - to even, there are a couple that had press runs in the millions. So, you would subscribe to these journals, and you would get one in the mail every month, and you would read it very carefully. You would discuss it with all your friends, you would be curious about all the novelties, everything that we considered kind of important that was published within the Soviet Union that wasn't underground literature, of course, was first published in these journals. For example, if you think about Solzhenitsyn, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" first appeared in one of these journals. So truly, Soviet literature was made by these journals, and it was received through these journals, and it mattered a whole deal. If you think about it, if you're a reader of magazines, you certainly pay attention to the visual format, right? It makes all the difference in the world, not just how things are illustrated, how things are... how the page layout is designed, but even simple things like, what is the quality of the paper, right? It raises all kinds of questions to what value you assign to the things that you're actually reading. So, very little attention has been paid to this by scholars, and that's where my research comes in, and what I'm trying to give us is really a history of this medium, of this media format that was, I mean, it existed already in the 19th century in the Russian Empire, but that was truly harnessed, and very successfully so, by the Soviets. That's what this is about. David Staley 4:16 So, why was the regime so interested in having an educated, literate citizenry? Philip Gleissner 4:22 Yeah, this was part of the Marxist ideals of what socialist society should be like. That high culture, highbrow culture, was accessible to all citizens, and of course, this highbrow culture was also a means of communicating your ideological and your political goals and agenda. Some would say this is propaganda art, and of course, we may argue that all kinds of art have some sort of ideological agenda across the board, whether it's in the Soviet Union or not. So, that was why the Soviet Union was very committed to this. David Staley 4:59 So I... I'm trying to figure out how I want to say this, and I guess I want to say it sort of diplomatically. Are you...are you at all assessing the quality of this literature? Is it any good? Philip Gleissner 5:12 Yeah, I think that's a really tricky question, and it's always been hard for me to answer. So, much of Soviet literature is suffering from the ideological demands that were made on it, and that doesn't make for very interesting literature. Of course, there are also pieces that stand out, and they usually... they came up during specific time periods, in the 1920s in the 1960s to some extent, also in the 1970s. At the end of the day, though, I'm not that interested in that kind of esthetic assessment that it doesn't... it doesn't quite feel like my place, or even a meaningful kind of knowledge to generate. I think about, for example, what texts are meaningful to talk about to explain specific historical contexts, or even what texts are useful in the classroom. But, in my research, I'm mostly really interested in the processes that led to the creation of these texts, and I haven't talked about this much yet. If you think about a journal, it's all about if they have editorial boards, they have editorial staff. Much of Soviet literature was co-written by these editors, right, that then made, made all these requests to the authors on how things needed to be changed, and this is long before even the censor got involved, so which, of course, when we think about Soviet literature, we think the censor. I've worked in archives a lot, and you can really, you have a clear notion that a lot of that work was already done within these editorial offices. So, I think it's really interesting to analyze this institutional setup, this kind of machine that produced these literary texts and these institutions and all the people that were involved, so, it's always from the production side. It's kind of interesting to me how texts take shape, and I think that's something that's transferable to all, again, across the world and to all kinds of cultural production, right? We always think of that one genius person, maybe, that created something, but of course, there's a whole apparatus involved. And then the other thing that I'm so interested in is really the reception part, right? David Staley 7:15 That was going to be my next question, what do you know about the readers of these texts? Philip Gleissner 7:19 So, fortunately, from the archives, we actually know a whole lot about these readers. David Staley 7:25 No kidding. Philip Gleissner 7:25 Of course, first, I analyze a lot the format of these journals, and think about how readers received these texts by looking at the journals. For example, one journal always printed a picture of the author next to these texts, and there was some sort of... what developed out of it was some sort of star culture. In the 60s, Soviet writers were really kind of close to, like, what we would think about film stars or something. But then, we get that whole... we actually do have access to that kind of information, because one of the things Soviet writers did is they wrote lots and lots and lots of letters to their editors, and a fraction, not, not all of these letters were kept, but a significant fraction, and I believe represented a fraction of these letters, is held in literary archives in Moscow, and I've worked in those archives a lot, and it's quite fascinating how readers respond to these texts. They often explain what they like, they explain what they hate. So, these journals really give us a notion of how it mattered to to the common reader. This was not something that was part as kind of as the command economy that was just part of planning, and then was... they had this cultural production that no one cared about; no, these were truly things that people cared to respond to. David Staley 8:41 So what did they like? What did they hate? Philip Gleissner 8:42 I have a really interesting example from a journal that I worked with, or that I that I studied, and it is called... so, all of these journals had some sort of... they needed some profile, right? There were maybe, at the height, maybe twenty really significant and big journals, and they all had some sort of profile. This journal's profile was to publish foreign literature and translation, so a little bit different from what I talked about so far, that was Soviet literature. Now, it was really for many Soviet readers, this was a window into the world, right? A window into the world, and predictably, in the 1960s much of what was published in these journals was from the the rest of the socialist world. But, then there was also American literature, there was Faulkner, there was French literature, there was Sartre, there was German literature, whatever you... whatever you like. Of course, there were certain things that were not allowed, that is also... that is also very clear. But, what is so interesting about this journal, it kind of became a desirable... it was probably one of the most desirable journals to have a subscription to, and became, kind of like a makeshift import commodity. And people really thought of, from the letters, you can tell that they started thinking of this as some kind of like the... it was the literary luxury commodity of sorts. And in the letters they tried, they started to influence, or try to influence their editors to publish more of what was the most prestigious stuff for them, or the most desirable, right, what was really the most desirable good. And unsurprisingly, that was literature from the United States, that was literature from France, that was, you know, things from generally from the West, from places that were inaccessible, but places also that had that kind of attraction of being the capitalist world to some of the readers. And they started in their letters - of course, in the Soviet Union, you could write this in a letter in the 1960s and 70s and probably nothing serious would have happened - you could have written in a letter, oh, I just really love the United States, and I want to read American authors, but readers were smart enough to not do that. They learned the language of literary criticism, which was also published in these journals, and then they explained, in so many ways, why they really needed translations from English and why they didn't need translations and literatures from the Global South, which officially the Soviet Union was very invested in, in kind of the nations that they aligned with ideologically in, say, Africa or in Asia, and the readers talked about kind of the quality of these texts in so many ways, but ultimately, just in order... it becomes very transparent at some point in order to request more Western goods. So, that is one example of how we can get a notion of how the Soviet reader operated within the system, and really how their language and their thinking was shaped, or is a response to what the journals did. David Staley 11:47 And the editors were okay with this? Philip Gleissner 11:49 The editors, also - this is another fascinating detail of Soviet culture. All these journals had massive offices, so a staff of 40 or 60 editors, and one or two poor people had the sole responsibility of responding to these letters, because every reader was entitled to respond to their letters, and sometimes we do have the responses in the archive as well, and the editors or the head of the letters department get fairly grumpy with their readers and get quite explicit on calling them out on their chauvinist thinking or on their backward thinking in that respect. So, we get that too. David Staley 12:34 Well, I know that the book, the second part of the book, in particular, you were looking at the question of how culture spreads across national borders, not just simply within the So - well, within the Soviet Union, within the Eastern Bloc. And you're working on another project, right, "Red Migrations", that deals with these same themes? Tell us what the larger theme is here? Philip Gleissner 12:58 Yeah, so a colleague of mine, Bradley Gorski, who is at Georgetown University, and I, we've been, we had been talking about this for years, that we understand after the Russian Revolution of 1917, there was a huge wave of emigration to the West from the Soviet Union, and there are many histories written about that emigration, that, and you know, that include the Russian nobility, that include kind of the upper classes, people that fled after the revolution simply because they couldn't live, they couldn't find a place within that new social order, or because it was not safe for them to stay, of course. So, we know all these stories and our history of the Russian or the Soviet emigration, is kind of a history that has always been written as a history of negation, right? This was, were political forces that were opposed to the Soviet Union. And for a long time we've been talking about this to each other, and we thought, well, it is so fascinating that what we completely miss is that there is also that transnational network of artists, of writers, of political thinkers, of philosophers who were really attracted to the Soviet Union or who left the Soviet Union only to further pursue the Soviet project and to, in the early years, to pursue the World Revolution across the world. And we've started to look more and more into it and gather a group of scholars, and there were, surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, we were lucky to find a lot of colleagues that were very interested in this, in asking questions that still seem important, that have to do with transnational solidarities that are idealistically framed in terms of thinking alternative modes for societies or utopian modes for societies, toward toward greater justice and equity, which were theoretically - and I underline theoretically here - part of the Soviet project at different moments. So, the Soviet Union in the 1920s and especially 1930s was very interested in being in touch with anti-racist movements within the United States and with Black activists in the United States. And, of course, we also understand that in the Soviet Union, this all became appropriated with a very propagandistic goal, right? It was, it ultimately became another argument against the capitalist system in the United States. But, nonetheless, there are some interesting moments in there that are trying to work towards some sort of solidarities across borders, and that's what we got really interested in. And our colleagues that contributed to this volume found a lot of interesting moments from the early 1920s to the 1970s. David Staley 15:55 So, are you looking at how they're all communicating with each other? Philip Gleissner 15:59 There are a lot of essays in this volume that are looking specifically at how people travel to the Soviet Union. David Staley 16:06 Actual movement, yeah? Philip Gleissner 16:07 Yeah, it's a lot, I think that was our requirement. Everyone had to write about some sort of movement, and it didn't have to be long time displacement that we think of as migration; in fact, what we were really interested in was the transnational connections, the connections between people in different countries that lead to what scholars of transnationalism call "a multiplicity of involvements", right? So, you have multiple kind of loyalties to different communities, to different countries. A common example from today is is dual citizens that vote in two countries, or something like that. And we were interested in pushing people to think about how these multiplicities of involvements mapped out, how they impacted what people did in terms of how they shaped their politics, of how they wrote their literary work. So, I have an essay myself in that volume that deals specifically with East and West German leftist writers that went to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and actually met... well, first of all, had encounters with the Soviet Union that were important for them ideologically and artistically, but then also had awkward encounters with each others coming now from two competing German states. So, that's what we're looking at in this. David Staley 17:30 Tell us more about those awkward encounters. So, these are, these are East and West Germans in Moscow, say? Philip Gleissner 17:36 Yeah. So it's... the challenges, of course, that already by the 60s, there is that big disconnect between East and West Germans in terms of how they perceive their leftism. So, in East Germany, if you were a socialist, you had to somehow work with the Soviet Union in a fairly narrowly determined ideological manner. If you were a West German leftist, you most likely you were still interested in Eastern Europe. You were interested in the Soviet Union, you were interested along the lines of finding some sort of post-war reconciliation or some kind of dialogue. And for the East Germans, that was less of a concern because they simply had their predetermined set of ideological goals that they were operating within. They were also the more, or thought of themselves as the more serious Marxists. For the West Germans, it didn't matter all that much anymore, how kind of how the letter of Marxist theory mapped out Germany in the 1960s. West Germany was the country of social democracy, right, or the Social Democrats, which are very different in their approach to ideology, and we have that in the way then these West German writers write about the Soviet Union as well, in a much more jovial way, less serious, slightly more exoticizing also, or orientalizing, making it look like, that's the wild East, or something like that. And to the East Germans, that was all kind of cheap and unacceptable, watering down of the serious goals of the Soviet project and the projects of state socialism. David Staley 19:31 Would East and West German leftists have had any other occasion to interact,other than these trips to Moscow? Philip Gleissner 19:41 Well, especially in the early 19 - before the wall, of course - David Staley 19:45 Which was 1961, if I'm remembering correct. Philip Gleissner 19:47 Yes, yes, and before, before that happened, it was easier to travel between the two countries. Of course, if you were higher up within the cultural system or the political system of East Germany, you could still travel to West Germany and West Germans could still go to the German Democratic Republic. But, that happened not all that much, or it happened in very predetermined ways, whereas the ones that met in Moscow hadn't selected each other, they had been selected by the Soviet Writers Union, and therefore they had to meet people that they didn't particularly enjoy meeting and that were more challenging to them to talk to. David Staley 20:31 Well, I know you are working on a third project that is very different from what we've been talking about: "Resilient in the Kitchen". Well, I'll just, I'll just give the title; tell us what this project entails. Philip Gleissner 20:43 So, this is a project that my colleague, Dr. Harry Kashdan, who was, at the time, a postdoc at OSU and I, started in - it must have been May 2020, we applied for a grant. And if you go back to that time, that was, in terms of research, that was a time when most of the things we did didn't seem all that important anymore. Again, early days of the pandemic, I probably wouldn't have been very interested in talking about literary journalists with you. Also, our traditional research work came to a bit of a stop. For example, my research that I do on the periodicals very much relies on library collections, it relies very much on archives, which are in Moscow. So, all that was impossible, it at all came out of reach. As far as the Moscow archives are concerned, they will remain out of reach for the foreseeable future, for political reasons. But going back to that May, we thought about, well, what can we do in terms of research that still deals with our interests, but at the same time speaks to the current moment? And one of the... there were a couple of surprising things in March, April, May, 2020. One of them was that everyone thought that this was unprecedented, there was a significant number of people that was not willing to believe that it was happening, that there was such a thing as a pandemic and that we would need to isolate for a while, and at the same time, historians tell us, well, no, of course, these things have happened. The Great Influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 was comparable in its results and its impact, and yet we somehow forgotten about it. So, one of our questions was, well, questions was, well, how are we going to document this moment to make sure that it's not forgotten? Then, following the news, we realized that there are a couple of demographics that were particularly impacted by the complete standstill that our lives came to. One of them was, is, was at the time, people that relied in their lives on international travel and international networks, on tight knit communities that supported each other and could now not see each other anymore within countries. That's migrants, right, immigrants, immigrant communities, I talked about the multiplicity of involvements before, I imagine that that was all cut off by the stop to travel. But then even those tight knit communities within the United States, they were often hit hardest because they lived in more areas with higher population density, or even apartments with higher population density, they relied much more on mutual assistance, which became impossible. So, that was a group that was very much impacted, and again, with my background in migration and transnational networks, I was very concerned about that. And then finally, we still hadn't figured out how to talk about all of this and how to document it, and looking at our social media and looking at the news, well, everyone was obsessed with sour dough baking and with making all kinds of food, and the grocery stores being emptied and there was no yeast, there was no flour. So, we thought about, how are we going to bring all of this together? And that's where that project was born, that was to say, okay, let's document this moment for these... with a specific focus on these groups, immigrant communities and migrants. Let's document this moment through the lens of food, and that's where it all started. And we started... we started, pretty much right away, a digital archive where people can contribute their own stories, because we thought, really, this was not the moment for us to research and collect ourselves, but it was the moment for us to provide pathways toward documenting and sharing. This archive is now called the COVID Food Archive, it's covidfoodarchive.org. Everyone, not just migrants, everyone can contribute their stories about food, about how the pandemic changed their eating, how quarantine changed what they cooked, how they think about food. So, that was one part of the project, and then finally, we started thinking also in terms of, well, how can we do something that is a little more concrete or more tangible that will be... ultimately, we were looking to make a book. We wanted a material object in the world, not just a still, surprisingly fleeting or ephemeral digital archive - although we hope that will be there for a long time, and that people will keep contributing their own stories about their own experience for a long time - but, we start thinking about, well, it would be really nice to do a book about this. And we started talking to immigrant chefs who, also in April and May, many of them had lost their livelihood, or they had lost at least for a while. Some of them gave up on their restaurants completely and forever; others just kind of pivoted. There's a lot of pivoting in the stories that we learned. So, we talked to immigrant chefs, we talked to food activists, we talked to food writers, and with a group of about fifteen of these people, we brought together this volume where we have a very diverse set of essays where they tell, some of them tell their very personal stories, their immigrant experiences and their experiences in the food industry. Others tell more... have written about kind of historical occurrences of public health campaigns that were also misused to keep immigrant street vendors off the streets of American cities, for example, and they've seen parallels in there in how public health efforts were particularly, during the COVID pandemic, were particularly unforgiving toward immigrant communities. So, this volume finally came together, and as you can imagine, writing a volume about the pandemic during the pandemic was somewhat complicated, and I think there was a lot of rewriting involved, or I know for a fact there was a lot of rewriting involved, because I read all these stories as they unfolded together with my co-editor. And our contributors shared these really fascinating and thoughtful stories about their own lives. They also shared recipes, because it was important for us to think about this, again, of some sort of embodied knowledge, right? This is not just... we didn't just want people to read about, oh, what is this experience of a Palestinian American chef during the pandemic? How did the pandemic impact their specific or their family's life in the West Bank, and the connections that they could or could not have during that period? We also wanted our readers to have the opportunity to actually experience kind of what... a food that mattered to these writers, and interestingly - this is probably me not advertising the book all that well - so everyone contributed a recipe, but what was so interesting during the pandemic, many of these acclaimed chefs and food writers started cooking food they didn't like. David Staley 28:31 Really? Philip Gleissner 28:32 They cooked chicken cutlets their mother made, that they weren't particularly wild or crazy about, or they cooked stuffed cabbage leaves that they didn't really like. But, the point was to experience a sort of connection when you couldn't be in direct contact with your community, where you were questioning or where you were starting to lose the affirmation of your own identity that that community provided. So, it didn't necessarily matter that the food tasted that great or it didn't taste that great, what mattered was that it provided some sort of connection, and some kind of very physical connection. So, going back to the physical connection, that's why we included recipes in this book, and I must also say some of them are wonderful recipes that are actually part of it. David Staley 29:19 I would assume as much. Philip Gleissner 29:20 Yes. And we have wonderful food photography in the volume with with a local Columbus, Ohio food photographer. So, altogether, we hope that this will reflect like a rich experience of immigrant life, both during the pandemic, but also far beyond. This is not just a book about COVID, because no one necessarily wants to to read a book about that experience, about of COVID, but it's really... that's why we called it "Resilience in the Kitchen", or "Resilient Kitchen", sorry, because we wanted to highlight that moment that people found all these avenues toward affirmative and positive experiences during what was an incredibly challenging time for them. David Staley 30:03 So, three projects at work right now - what's on the horizon, what's next for your research? Philip Gleissner 30:09 Yeah, I'm feeling very... so, fortunately, the volumes are nearly done, and they're... David Staley 30:17 Congratulations. Philip Gleissner 30:19 The food writing volume is coming out in April, so stay tuned for that. But, I'm also feeling very pressured to embark on a new project that has something to do with the research in print media that I've been doing before, but it's born out of something that is happening currently in Russia, and you may have heard of something that is called the gay propaganda law. David Staley 30:44 Yes. Philip Gleissner 30:45 The gay propaganda law in Russia, basically, for, and already for about ten years, has made it illegal to positively speak of what is referred to as non-traditional sexual orientations or kinds of relationship in front of minors. So, it was always... that was the rules. We couldn't talk about it in front of someone that was younger than 18. Now, the current effort, that alone, we understand, is an effort to erase queer people from public discourse, to make their experience invisible. But the current effort is going even further, and it's trying to make it illegal wholesale to say anything positive about LGBTQ people or their lives, regardless of what age the audience. In this moment of erasure of queer people from the public space in Russia, I think it's important to document also the rich cultural heritage that is actually there, that has been built by queer people in Russia. And I got particularly interested... now, of course, there were always queer communities in Russia, even in the Soviet Union, homosexuality was illegal. Male homosexuality, at least, was illegal, female homosexuality was treated as a mental illness. Then homosexuality, or homosexual acts, we should rather say, were legalized or became legal with the end of the Soviet criminal code at the end of the Soviet Union. Now, what do you think, do queer people do, kind of, what's the first thing you do once you become legal in the public space? Well, they've started founding all these, again, literary journals, because that is and that just also testifies to the significance of these print media to the experience within Soviet and post-Soviet culture. So, they started all these... many of them were short lived, maybe two issues, three issues, some of them were surprisingly long lived. It was always around literature, and they were illustrated, some of them quite nicely and in quite humorous ways. At the same time, little of that is documented. They are, scattered issues are here and there in research libraries in Western Europe or in the United States, and as you can imagine, in Russia, these journals would be less accessible, many of them ended in the early 2000s. So, I've made it my kind of goal to document as much as possible of all of this while it is still around, to talk to the people that work in this, do interviews, to have a, ultimately, a digital archive. I come also from a digital humanities background, so research in literary studies or cultural studies that uses computational methods. You can imagine, I didn't read all of the Soviet literary journals that I talk about, and indeed, in my book, I have a whole chapter where I use digital methods to talk about what the communities in there, what the topics in there were, and so forth. But going back to the current project, it made me rethink what digital humanities work can do, because this is not just a matter of collecting these things, digitizing them, if copyright allows for putting them on the internet, because, in fact, right now in Russia, visibility of this kind of material can again create problems for the people that are involved in it. It's easily... you can easily imagine that if we created a beautiful digital archive that documented all the people that were involved in this in the late 90s and early 2000s, you're delivering basically an index of people that could be harassed by the state or by other people. So, part of this project is thinking through queer approaches, I won't say approaches that sustain queer communities with these projects. So, it will take a slightly... it will have to take a slightly different form. Other questions that also occur; what should actually go in this archive? Who's going to decide what's queer and what's not queer? What is queer publishing and what isn't? I don't have a... gotten to the bottom of this answer yet, but preliminarily, I, of course, what matters is how editors or participants of these media define the media themselves. Some of them are called gay, gay journal, lesbian journal, and so forth. But another one is also to think about what I call queer editorial strategies, right? Editorial strategies that are aimed toward making visible communities of queer people, that are aimed toward making visible and supporting the depiction or representation of non-heteronormative modes of relationships and love and sexuality. So, this is still in its early... in its early stage, but I also am really looking forward to moving forward with it. David Staley 35:46 Philip Gleissner, thank you. Philip Gleissner 35:47 Thank you. Eva Dale 35:50 Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services Studio. More information about guests on Voices of Excellence can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale. Transcribed by https://otter.ai