Revolutionary Diets: Famine, Science, and Literature in Early Soviet Russia

This project focuses on how narratives of eating and starving, that permeated early-Soviet literature, parallel the changing views on nutrition in medical and popular scientific discourses.

The purpose of the project is to investigate the ways in which the framework of hunger shapes literary responses to the Bolshevik attempts to curtail post-revolutionary famine by controlling food supplies and redefine eating as a collective practice amenable to scientific intervention.

More minutely, I will examine how early-Soviet literature responded to governmental control over the supply of provisions for a whole society (through food rationing) and individual diets of its citizens (through nutritional advice).

The aim is to demonstrate that, in entering literary narratives, the language of hunger provided a way of resisting the arrangements of dependency instituted in the early years of Soviet rule.

Through an interdisciplinary approach my book and accompanying articles will uncover an important area of post-revolutionary literary and cultural history, showing how cultural constructions of food and eating were indispensable for articulating a largely underexamined Soviet nutritional modernity.

By examining revolutionary and post-revolutionary diets captured in literary, autobiographical, popular-scientific materials, and state-supported nutritional advice, my project contributes to the fields of literary studies, food studies, and interdisciplinary studies in medical humanities.