Three Takes on Slovo patsana (The Boy’s Word, 2023)
A SSEES Cinema Research Group seminar with Professor Engström, Professor Strukov and Professor Graffy
Three Takes on Slovo patsana (The Boy’s Word, 2023)
21 Oct 2024, 18:00 – 20:00
This event offers three takes on Slovo patsana: Krov´ na asfal´te) (The Boy’s Word: Blood on the Asphalt, 2023), the phenomenally successful eight-part TV series directed by Zhora Kryzhovnikov and written by Kryzhovnikov and Andrei Zolotarev. Based on The Boy’s Word: Criminal Tatarstan of the 1970s–2010s, Tatar journalist Robert Garaev’s novel about the so-called ‘Kazan´ phenomemon’ (the crime wave that hit the city in the late 1980s), the series has enjoyed huge popularity among viewers in Russia while also giving rise to concerns that it has led to an increase in violent criminality among young people.
Take one: Professor Engström will analyse Slovo patsana in the context of the Russian conservative turn of the 2020s, arguing that the series’ phenomenal success can be explained not only by the traditional popularity of the criminal drama in Russia or its exceptional visual and musical qualities, but also by its timeliness. Today, as in 1989, Russia is in a liminal state; the old order is in agony and the future is open. The main protagonists – Andrei, Marat and Vova – try to answer the main “Russian question” raised by Fedor Dostoevskii in Crime and Punishment: ‘whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right…’. They demonstrate three different paths of resisting evil with evil and three strategies for navigating social and existential chaos.
Take two: Professor Strukov will focus on two separate and yet interconnected concerns: Muslim societies and gender, sex and sexuality. The events are set in the city of Kazan´, evoking Russian Imperial history, and raising questions about the role of ethnic and religious minorities in the construction of the contemporary Russian state. The criminal gangs that the series examines use their own normative forms of relations in terms of gender and sexual identity. Professor Strukov will demonstrate how these criminal norms are translated into present-day official anti-gender, anti-LGBTQI+ discourse in the Russian Federation.
Take three: Professor Graffy will consider Slovo patsana in dialogue with other films and TV serials, including the long context of the shkol´nyi fil´m (school film); the films of the mid-1980s (in which the serial is set); and contemporary serial production, which pays particular attention to the lives of troubled young people.
Image credit: Still from Slovo patsana (A Boy’s Word, 2023). Source: IMDb
Maria Engström
is Professor of Russian and Director of the Master's Programme in Russian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on Soviet underground culture, Russian queer visual culture, and contemporary Russian conservatism and the radical right. Engström’s latest publications include the articles ‘Late-Soviet Occulture: Evgenii Golovin and the Iuzhinskii Circle’ (2024), ‘Queering Socialist Realism: The Case of Georgy Guryanov’ (2023), ‘Russian metamodernism: the neo rave and cultural recycling of the 1990s’ (2022), ‘Russia as the West’s queer other: Gosha Rubchinskiy’s politics of fashion’ (2022), and ‘Transgressing the Mainstream: Camp, Queer and Populism in Russian Visual Culture’ (2021). She also co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (Oxford UP, 2024). Her current research project ‘No(w)stalgia of Modernity: Neo-Soviet Myth in Contemporary Russian Culture’ (2021-2024) is supported by the Swedish Research Council.
Vlad Strukov
is Professor of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Leeds, and Visiting Professor at Università Ca' Foscari Venezia. His recent research has focused on queer visual cultures, digital media of the Global South and Global East, and indigenous Muslim minority cultures - funded by the British Academy, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and Leeds Faculty of Arts. He is the author of several publications on contemporary Russian and Russophone film and media including his monograph Contemporary Russian Cinema: Symbols of a New Era (Edinburgh UP, 2016), and the articles ‘Queer Women of Kantemir Balagov: Subjectivities in Extreme Contexts’ (2023), and ‘Queer Families: Gender, Sexuality and the Neoliberal State on Russian Television’ (2021).
Julian Graffy
is Emeritus Professor of Russian Literature and Cinema at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He has written widely on Russian and Soviet film.
Further information
Ticketing
Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes