Russian language survived the time of two empires - the Russian Empire and the USSR. A feature of any empire is colonialism, and descendants scattered around the world. Classical Russian literature has become a recognizable concept, part of Russian culture. But today Russian language is used by millions of people born outside of Russia, not necessarily ethnic Russians. Some of them call themselves native Russian speakers. Russophone literature today represented in many counties outside Russia and not only Post Soviet as Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, there are U.S. Russophone writers, Israeli, European, etc.
My collection of short stories Kazakhstani Fairy Tales presents stories and fables set in different geographical locations throughout Kazakhstan. The adjective “Kazakhstani” refers to multi-ethnic Kazakhstan as a whole, while “Kazakh” refers to the specific ethnic group. In contrast to ethnic Kazakh folklore and fairy tales (which have a long, rich literary and oral history), this stories are inspired by folkloric stylistics and contemporary multi-cultural Kazakhstan. During the panel discussion I would like to talk about perception of Russian language as pluricentric language and Russophone literature as a part of multicultural global literature and contribute a review of short stories by themes, authors, counties they represent, that recently been translated and published in English language. I’m going to talk about parallels and differences in Russian and Russophone short stories using my experience in being serve as an editor of prose section of Literratura literary magazine editing both Russian and Russophone short stories for the last five years.