Sofya Khagi
Biographic Data
| ID | 1077334 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sofya Khagi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sofya |
| FAMILY NAME | Khagi |
| SIGNATURE | KHAGI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0009-0004-6744-691X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Weak Subjectivity
This essay is a contribution to the book forum "The Power of Soft Matter" discussing Julia Vaingurt's book Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism (2025), which identifies weakness as a defining aesthetic and ethical strategy in late Soviet nonofficial culture. By analyzing authors who intentionally cultivated vulnerability and failure, the book illustrates how these artists rejected the state's ideological obsession with he…
Power and the Aerial Sublime in Victor Pelevin
This essay distinguishes flight as a salient trope throughout multiple Pelevin texts: Omon Ra (1992), Chapaev and the Void (1996), Generation P (1999), Empire V (2006), and Love for Three Zuckerbrins (2014). It examines flight through the aesthetics of the sublime—classical, (post)‐Soviet, and postmodern. The “aerial sublime” focuses on the motifs of flight, elevation, and their reversal such as descent and going underground. Through this analysi…
Introduction
This cluster of articles by Sofya Khagi, Tatiana Filimonova, Daniel Taehun Lee, and Maya Vinokour examines the oeuvre of Victor Pelevin over the last three decades, interrogating his relationship with various forms of power. In the introduction, the authors survey recent scholarship on power in Pelevin’s work, positing the primacy of power in his literary project at various points in his writing career. The articles examine Pelevin’s vision of po…
Introduction
Alternative Historical Imagination in Viktor Pelevin
One Billion Years after the End of the World
The importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet science fiction has been thoroughly examined. A less-explored question concerns how they have continued to inspire post-Soviet authors who muse on an environment that differs drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. Sofya Khagi explores how prominent contemporary writers-Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin-examine the …
Garros-Evdokimov and Commodification of the Baltics
Recent groundbreaking analyses of the Baltics have focused on decolonization and national and postcolonial subjectivity. A related but somewhat divergent approach to postcolonial, ethnic and global studies in the Baltic context is to explore the response of contemporary Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian cultures to the introduction of consumer capitalism, intra-European community and global pop-culture. A long-awaited independence brought by the S…
From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens
Boast ing a rich tradition of utopian/dystopian fiction, Russian literature has seen the most recent burgeoning of the genre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With the advancement of Gorbachev's reforms in the mid-1980s, Russian writers engaged in an increasingly open attack on the mythology of Socialist utopia. It was during those years that the negative subgenre of dystopia once again came to the forefront of literature. A…
Art as Aping
Alternative Historical Imagination in Viktor Pelevin
Garros-Evdokimov and Commodification of the Baltics
Recent groundbreaking analyses of the Baltics have focused on decolonization and national and postcolonial subjectivity. A related but somewhat divergent approach to postcolonial, ethnic and global studies in the Baltic context is to explore the response of contemporary Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian cultures to the introduction of consumer capitalism, intra-European community and global pop-culture. A long-awaited independence brought by the S…
From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens
Boast ing a rich tradition of utopian/dystopian fiction, Russian literature has seen the most recent burgeoning of the genre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With the advancement of Gorbachev's reforms in the mid-1980s, Russian writers engaged in an increasingly open attack on the mythology of Socialist utopia. It was during those years that the negative subgenre of dystopia once again came to the forefront of literature. A…
Art as Aping
From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens
Boast ing a rich tradition of utopian/dystopian fiction, Russian literature has seen the most recent burgeoning of the genre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With the advancement of Gorbachev's reforms in the mid-1980s, Russian writers engaged in an increasingly open attack on the mythology of Socialist utopia. It was during those years that the negative subgenre of dystopia once again came to the forefront of literature. A…
Garros-Evdokimov and Commodification of the Baltics
Recent groundbreaking analyses of the Baltics have focused on decolonization and national and postcolonial subjectivity. A related but somewhat divergent approach to postcolonial, ethnic and global studies in the Baltic context is to explore the response of contemporary Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian cultures to the introduction of consumer capitalism, intra-European community and global pop-culture. A long-awaited independence brought by the S…
One Billion Years after the End of the World
The importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet science fiction has been thoroughly examined. A less-explored question concerns how they have continued to inspire post-Soviet authors who muse on an environment that differs drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. Sofya Khagi explores how prominent contemporary writers-Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin-examine the …
Introduction
Alternative Historical Imagination in Viktor Pelevin
Power and the Aerial Sublime in Victor Pelevin
This essay distinguishes flight as a salient trope throughout multiple Pelevin texts: Omon Ra (1992), Chapaev and the Void (1996), Generation P (1999), Empire V (2006), and Love for Three Zuckerbrins (2014). It examines flight through the aesthetics of the sublime—classical, (post)‐Soviet, and postmodern. The “aerial sublime” focuses on the motifs of flight, elevation, and their reversal such as descent and going underground. Through this analysi…
Introduction
This cluster of articles by Sofya Khagi, Tatiana Filimonova, Daniel Taehun Lee, and Maya Vinokour examines the oeuvre of Victor Pelevin over the last three decades, interrogating his relationship with various forms of power. In the introduction, the authors survey recent scholarship on power in Pelevin’s work, positing the primacy of power in his literary project at various points in his writing career. The articles examine Pelevin’s vision of po…
Weak Subjectivity
This essay is a contribution to the book forum "The Power of Soft Matter" discussing Julia Vaingurt's book Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism (2025), which identifies weakness as a defining aesthetic and ethical strategy in late Soviet nonofficial culture. By analyzing authors who intentionally cultivated vulnerability and failure, the book illustrates how these artists rejected the state's ideological obsession with he…
Art (6 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (3 works)