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The “underground” Soviet rock scene of the 1980s has received considerable scholarly attention, particularly after the fall of the USSR when available channels of information opened up even more than in the glasnost years. Both Russian and American academics have tackled the political implications and historical innovations of perestroika-era groups such as Akvarium, Mashina Vremeni, and DDT. Similarly, the Beatles craze of the 1960s is also frequently mentioned in scholarly works as an enormous social phenomenon in the USSR – academics and critics alike wax poetic about the influence of the Fab Four on the drab daily lives of Soviet citizens. Yet what happened in between these two moments of Soviet musical life? Very little critical work has been done on Soviet popular music of the 1970s, its place in Soviet society, or its relationship to Western influences. That is the lacuna I address in this work. My dissertation examines state-approved popular music – so-called estrada or “music of the small stage” – produced in the USSR during the 1970s. Since detailed scholarly work has been done on the performers of this decade, I focus instead on the output and reception of several popular composers and musical groups of the time, exploring the relationship formed between songwriter, performer, audience, and state. I do so in order to investigate and answer the following question: in the larger narrative of Soviet culture, what was the role of pop and rock music in the 1970s, a decade so ostensibly barren that even Russians refer to it as “the stagnation” (zastoi)? An examination of the popular composers and songwriters who literally and figuratively wrote the soundtrack to this decade of Soviet life shows how room for flexibility and openness to certain Western rock influences could exist within Soviet state-approved music – so often dismissed as ideologically conservative. Likewise, a better understanding of the men and women behind the songs and groups of this era sheds

This study was conducted to identify, quantify, and compare the types and number of negative transfer errors in the written essays of HL and L2 learners of Russian, particularly to categorize all instances of negative transfer. It was also focused on determining which linguistic subsystem is most influenced by negative transfer from English to Russian. This study added a new dimension to the current linguistic knowledge concerning negative transfer and the literature available in the area of Russian language pedagogy. Sixty HL and 60 L2 learners of Russian of the intermediate mid level of proficiency enrolled in Russian language classes at UCLA participated in the study. Written essays submitted for the ACTR National Post-Secondary Russian Essay Contest on four topics were used as the primary data source.The most important finding from this research was that HL learners produced twice as many negative transfer errors as did L2 learners of Russian. Other important findings of the study reinforced the idea that writing in Russian showed the influence of English linguistic structures in four subsystems: lexical, semantic, syntactic, and orthographic. The research returned empirical evidence that, for both groups of learners, lexical and semantic subsystems were more vulnerable to the English-based linguistic structures than syntax and orthography.Conclusions from this study hold pedagogical implications for Russian language instruction. For example, comprehensible meaning-focused input at the vocabulary level should be a part of the curriculum and material design. Guidelines were offered for creating comprehensive instructional intervention and productive activities that can strengthen vocabulary development and assist learners in minimizing and overcoming negative language transfer.

This dissertation introduces the concept of Russophonia, which refers to the widespread and variegated uses of the Russian language outside of the customary boundaries of ethnicity and nation. Using the designations of Anglophone, Francophone, and Sinophone literature as a model, I propose Russophone literature as an accurate and necessary classification for works that are too often dismissed as peripheral, or at best, awkwardly shoehorned into the existing Russian canon. I further argue that Russophone Studies, as a potential field of academic inquiry, would provide the space for understanding realities outside of an imperial center, and identities beyond a traditional understanding of nationality. The first chapter provides an introduction to Russophonia, illustrating its major issues through an analysis of works by Chingiz Aitmatov (1928-2008), Bakhytzhan Kanap'ianov (b. 1951), and Eduard Bagirov (b. 1975). The subsequent three chapters trace the development of Russophone literature in the Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. Chapter 2 dates the origins of Russophone literature to the Russian Empire's colonial expansion into Central Asia and the Caucasus, as the Russian language, Russian institutions, and contact with Russian intellectuals shaped the development of local literatures in the newly colonized areas. I show how early Russophone writers synthesized local literary forms with elements from Russian and West European literatures. I also discuss the processes of Soviet mythmaking by which Mirza Fatali Akhundov (1812-1878), Abai Kunanbaev(1845-1904), and Chokan Valikhanov (1835-1865) were recast as the foundational figures of national literary traditions in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. In chapter 3 I discuss the proliferation of Russophone literature as a product of the Soviet mandate for proletarian national literatures under the postwar ideology of the "friendship of peoples." I focus on the Soviet Thaw period of the late 1950s and early 60s, when post

Many postcolonial scholars have questioned the ethics of postmodern cultural production. Critics have labeled postmodernism a conceptual dead end - a disempowering aesthetic that does not offer a theory of agency in response to the workings of empire. This dissertation enters the conversation about the political alignment of postmodernism through a comparative study of postcommunist writing in Armenia and Russia, where the debates about the implications and usefulness of postmodernism have been equally charged. This project introduces the directions in which postcommunist postmodernisms developed in Armenia and Russia - in locally unique ways that reflected both the problems of the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present. It then moves on to an analysis of the work of five playwrights and novelists: Aghasi Ayvazyan, Perch Zeytuntsyan, Gurgen Khanjyan, Victor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sorokin. In reading the plays and novels of these authors, this study identifies several formal and stylistic connections between the post-Soviet renditions of the theater of the absurd and postmodernism: a resistance to interpretation accomplished by indeterminacy; a desire to push beyond the limits of logic; an emphasis on signs and symbols as opposed to their referents; and a rejection of well-made generic forms through the incorporation of intertextuality and textual play. On the thematic level, these plays and novels employ madness and confinement as metaphors for the problems of postcommunist nation building and politics. Through these images, the seemingly random, absurd texts of postcommunist postmodern culture unrelentingly interrogate the state apparatuses of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; they insist upon a confrontation with Soviet history as a means by which to recognize the Soviet Union and, in the post-Soviet era, Russia as empire. Through the suggestion that the post-Soviet period entails a process of post-Sovietization rather than a radical break from the Soviet p