Julia Vaingurt
Biographic Data
| ID | 1059815 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julia Vaingurt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julia |
| FAMILY NAME | Vaingurt |
| SIGNATURE | VAINGURT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0536-7309 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Response to the Forum
In this essay, Julia Vaingurt – the author of the book Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism (2025) discussed in the forum "The Power of Soft Matter" – responds to the forum participants. Vaingurt clarifies her conceptualization of a poetics of weakness as a deliberate strategy and performance rather than an inherent condition or lack of ability. She argues that choosing weakness functions as an ethical intervention agains…
Getting the Facts Straight
Devin Fore. Soviet Factography: Reality Without Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 320 pp. $37.50. ISBN 978-0-226-23486-1. We cannot yet provide at this point direct guidelines to this literature, since our main efforts during these years were directed toward the exposure of “artistic” corpses, but new documentary literature is already giving us an opportunity to make foundational conclusions on method—on the character of fixati…
Invasive Species
The word contagion, derived from Latin contagio , the combination of con (“together with”) and tagio (“touch”), suggests a close relationship between the human body and community. It stands to reason, then, that contagion narratives in one way or the other attempt to reflect upon one’s being in the world, with others, whether human or non‐human, and they do so through the theme of communicable disease and shared physical vulnerability. In the las…
Low Spirits and Immoderate Meditations in Venedikt Erofeev's Moskva-Petushki
My article analyzes Venedikt Erofeev's cultivation of weakness via alcoholic intoxication in Moskva-Petushki against the grain of its standard interpretations. The critical consensus holds that the protagonist (and by extension, the author, with whom he shares his name and autobiographical details) is a sober drunk and a holy fool. By contrast, I read the protagonist's failure to reach his destination and his untimely death in a less celebratory …
"Freedom and the Reality of Others in "Chapaev and the Void
Introduction Mastery and Method in Poetry
One of the greatest controversies in Dante scholarship concerns the authenticity of the epistle to Cangrande della Scala, in which the poet (if it is indeed him) provides his patron with exegetical and epistemological strategies to be applied in approaching Paradiso,the third part of his Divine Comedy.Accompanying this section as a gift to della Scala, the epistle in itself would not have appeared in any sense out of the ordinary had it not follo…
Human Machines and the Pains of Penmanship in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We
Poetry of Labor and Labor of Poetry
Poetry of Labor and Labor of Poetry
Human Machines and the Pains of Penmanship in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We
Introduction Mastery and Method in Poetry
One of the greatest controversies in Dante scholarship concerns the authenticity of the epistle to Cangrande della Scala, in which the poet (if it is indeed him) provides his patron with exegetical and epistemological strategies to be applied in approaching Paradiso,the third part of his Divine Comedy.Accompanying this section as a gift to della Scala, the epistle in itself would not have appeared in any sense out of the ordinary had it not follo…
"Freedom and the Reality of Others in "Chapaev and the Void
Low Spirits and Immoderate Meditations in Venedikt Erofeev's Moskva-Petushki
My article analyzes Venedikt Erofeev's cultivation of weakness via alcoholic intoxication in Moskva-Petushki against the grain of its standard interpretations. The critical consensus holds that the protagonist (and by extension, the author, with whom he shares his name and autobiographical details) is a sober drunk and a holy fool. By contrast, I read the protagonist's failure to reach his destination and his untimely death in a less celebratory …
Invasive Species
The word contagion, derived from Latin contagio , the combination of con (“together with”) and tagio (“touch”), suggests a close relationship between the human body and community. It stands to reason, then, that contagion narratives in one way or the other attempt to reflect upon one’s being in the world, with others, whether human or non‐human, and they do so through the theme of communicable disease and shared physical vulnerability. In the las…
Getting the Facts Straight
Devin Fore. Soviet Factography: Reality Without Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 320 pp. $37.50. ISBN 978-0-226-23486-1. We cannot yet provide at this point direct guidelines to this literature, since our main efforts during these years were directed toward the exposure of “artistic” corpses, but new documentary literature is already giving us an opportunity to make foundational conclusions on method—on the character of fixati…
Response to the Forum
In this essay, Julia Vaingurt – the author of the book Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism (2025) discussed in the forum "The Power of Soft Matter" – responds to the forum participants. Vaingurt clarifies her conceptualization of a poetics of weakness as a deliberate strategy and performance rather than an inherent condition or lack of ability. She argues that choosing weakness functions as an ethical intervention agains…
Art (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · History (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · History (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies (3 works) · Computer Science (2 works) · Epistemology (2 works) · Poetry (2 works)