Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies,
Brown University
Fabrizio Fenghi is an assistant professor of Slavic studies at Brown University specializing in contemporary Russian culture and politics, with a primary focus on the relationship between art and literature and the shaping of post-Soviet public culture.
His first book, It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia (University of Wisconsin Press: 2020), studies the ways in which the aesthetics and culture of Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, a radical countercultural movement, have influenced the development of Russian protest culture and the formation of state ideology during the Putin era. His current book project focuses on the politicization of literature and literary debates that occurred in Putin’s Russia in the context of an otherwise fundamental depoliticization of society.
In addition to these book-length projects, Fenghi has written articles on postmodern imperialist fiction, the Russian and French new waves of cinema in the 1960s, violence and national identity in post-Soviet media, and Silver Age theater. He is also a co-author and co-curator on the NEH-funded digital humanities project “The Post-Soviet Public Sphere,” an online multimedia archive and open-access edited collection of essays on the “long Russian 1990s,” from perestroika to Putin’s rise to power in the early 2000s.
At Brown, Fenghi teaches courses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian culture, literature, and politics, gender and sexuality, nationalism and national identity.
“Rise, you branded by a curse!” Aleksandr Lebedev-Frontov, 1995 ca.
It will be Fun and Terrifying:
Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020, Paperback 2021
The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin’s regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition.
To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines the public pronouncements and aesthetics of this influential movement. He analyzes a diverse range of media, including novels, art exhibitions, performances, seminars, punk rock concerts, and even protest actions. His interviews with key figures reveal an attempt to create an alternative intellectual class, or a “counter-intelligensia.” This volume shows how certain forms of art can transform into political action through the creation of new languages, institutions, and modes of collective participation.