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Please join the upcoming Slavic Colloquium talk entitled "Arab Writers and the Russian Girlfriend Fantasy" by Margaret Litvin (Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, Boston University).

This talk draws on Margaret Litvins completed book manuscript, Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance.

The talk will identify the Russian Girlfriend Fantasy, a feminine literary archetype often repeated or mocked in Arabic fiction set in the Soviet Union, and argue that this trope draws not only from Arab writers’ readings of 19th century Russian literature but also from contact with real-life Soviet women seeking to perform that internalized literary archetype.