The International Academic Conference "Russian and Belarusian Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries" was held at the Moscow House in Minsk. The forum was held both offline and online. The organizers timed the event to coincide with the anniversaries of Svetlana Goncharova-Grabovskaya and Irina Skoropanova, professors in the Department of Russian Literature at the Faculty of Philology at the Belarusian State University. They dedicated their lives to science and the university, pioneering philological education at BSU.
The conference was attended by approximately 70 professors, teachers, researchers, and undergraduate and graduate students from Belarus, Russia, China, and Montenegro. Participants presented their latest research and shared the results of their long-term work in literary studies. The focus was on contemporary literature trends in prose, poetry, and drama, as well as genre transformations, authorial strategies, and their characteristics. Particular attention was given to a comparative analysis of Russian and Belarusian literature and their mutual influence.
The conference program included plenary sessions and five thematic sections. Researchers presented topics such as transhumanism in contemporary Russian prose, the specifics of genre construction in A. Varlamov's prose, contemporary interpretations of the Russian Gothic novel, and others.
Svetlana Starostina, Associate Professor of the Department of Russian Language, Russian, and Foreign Literature at Derzhavin University, presented a paper entitled "G. Yakhina's Authorial Strategies in Network" at a section devoted to contemporary Russian and Belarusian prose.
"I’ve examined Guzel Yakhina's strategies as a contemporary network writer and focused on her communication with readers through her online pages and texts," said Svetlana Starostina, a philology lecturer at Tomsk State University. "She also touched on the effectiveness of Yakhina's online strategies for popularizing her works among the general readership."
The forum concluded with a workshop by Marina Volkova, a postgraduate student in the Department of Literature Teaching Methods at the Institute of Philology at Moscow State Pedagogical University, on the topic "Lev Losev and Boris Pasternak: Two Poems about Music. Continuity of Poetic Tradition." Natalia Tsvetova, a professor at the Higher School of Journalism and Mass Communications at St. Petersburg State University, also delivered a lecture on contemporary Russian prose—from the "mass" novel to "new realism." Following the conference, a collection of research papers is planned for publication in the BSU e-library.
