Articles Available Online

A Few Words on Maria Sudayeva   Slogans is a strange, extraordinary book: it describes a universe of total war where humanity no longer exists, or rather only in traces, and where the actors — actresses, rather, since these are almost always feminine creatures who appear and utter cries of rage — seem to belong to a dominant species other than homo sapiens It’s also extraordinary in its form: a series of instructions and slogans that describe, with the only narrative techniques being their alignment and their brutality, the chaos and suffering, the distant hopes, the apocalyptic whirlwind, the suicidal unrest of an entire planet No explanatory prose smoothes over the collision between writers and this terrifying war; no external voice slips into the text to guide the visitor and tell him the story No narrator, no characters, and yet a story transpires, filled with grandiose events and barely-felt emotions: an epic It’s a magnificent fiction wholly distanced from the ordinary traditions of the novel and, if poetry didn’t have such a poor reputation nowadays, it might even be said to evoke a sort of long poem   But this book becomes even stranger once we realise that Maria Sudayeva wrote it in two languages, French and Russian, accumulating neologisms and inextricably entwining the two idioms, with a conscious intent to refuse her images any tidy cultural anchor, and undoubtedly to affirm her disgust toward all manners of nationalism, even linguistic Because this woman, who took her life before she could be recognized for who she was — one of the most original artists of the new, post-Soviet generation, if not the most original — was also a partisan She was wary of a rebirth — she was certain of it — of Great Russian nationalism which would arise from the new Russia’s commercial and Mafia roots, and in opposition she maintained the principles of internationalism and radical cosmopolitan behaviour I met her once, in a place where the Russian world was shown in an unflattering light, and it was clear that her ability to speak Russian discomfited her She struggled to differentiate