Worlds Not So Far Apart:

Contacts and Analogies between Romance and Slavic Literatures

International Conference | July 15-17, 2025  | Sibiu, Romania

If the comparative linguistic study of the three major European language groups (Romance, Germanic, and Slavic) already has a tradition of almost two centuries both in terms of comparisons between the groups themselves and between members of the same group, the same cannot be said for the literatures written in their languages. The widest disciplinary dispersion can be observed in the case of Germanic literatures, where there seems to have been no interest so far either in writing a history covering all these literatures or in recognizing it as a distinct discipline. The picture seems to be more favorable with regard to the Romance and Slavic literatures, where, apart from certain attempts – albeit rather few, such as those of Nicolae Iorga (1920) and Dmitrij Tschižewskij (1971) – to synthesize historically each of these groups of literatures, the tendency to study them as clusters seems to have been institutionalized over the previous century in the form of specialized publications or departments.

However, beyond certain generally acknowledged and thoroughly described “waves” (e.g. the influence of French culture on Eastern European literatures in the 18th and 19th centuries), Romance and Slavic literatures as a whole are still seen as worlds apart, separated typologically by a linguistic barrier and geographically by the Germanic literatures of Central Europe. Of course, there are numerous examples that not only contradict this bias, but also show the complex entanglements between the two groups of literatures. For instance, as Alex Drace-Francis (2006) has shown, the period when the two Romanian principalities were under Russian military occupation (1829-1834) represented a turning point in their modernization process through the assimilation of French culture and ideologies. Another complex example may be the way in which Latin American literatures assimilated more or less simultaneously the critique of capitalism in the works of Soviet writers and the critique of totalitarianism in the writings of Eastern European dissidents. 

 

With these premises in mind, we invite scholars from various disciplines to submit proposals that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

      • What are the similarities and differences between “Latinity” and “pan-Slavism”? To what extent are they still relevant?

      • The influence of Romance literary models on nation-building processes in Slavic countries;

      • The reception of Romance writers in Slavic cultures and the reception of Slavic writers in Romance cultures;

      • The circulation of models, forms and styles between Romance and Slavic literatures;

      • The role of third-party (e.g., Germanic) cultures in mediating cultural and literary influences between Slavic and Romance literatures;

      • Romano-Slavic literary networks in modernism and the avant-garde;

      • Exile and diaspora of Slavic writers in Romance countries;

      • French self-colonization in Slavic literatures;

      • The role of translations as bridges between Romance and Slavic literatures;

      • Complex cases of Romance-Slavic cultural contact and interference (e.g., Republic of Moldova);

      • Quantitative analyses of data from Slavic and Romance literatures.

    Please submit a 250-word abstract and a short biography (100 words) to andrei.terian@ulbsibiu.ro and vlad.pojoga@ulbsibiu.ro by 06.04.2025. Proposals should include the title of the paper, the main arguments, and the methods employed. E-mails should have the title “NETSIM 2025 Conference.” Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15.04.2025.

    The conference “Worlds Not So Far Apart: Contacts and Analogies between Romance and Slavic Literatures” is organized within the framework of the NETSIM research grant (https://grants.ulbsibiu.ro/netsim/) .

    Day 1, July 15, 2025

    9:00-9:15: Registration

    9:15-9:30: Opening Remarks

    9:30-10:45: Keynote Address 1: Stefano Garzonio, The Evolution and Typology of Russian Attitudes towards Italian Culture

    10:45–11:00: Coffee Break

    11:00-13:00: Panel 1: Translationscapes and Transnational Landscapes

    Andrei Terian, Romance vs. Slavic World Literatures: Reflections Based on the Romanian Case

    Tomasz Krupa, Quantitative Translationscapes of Western Romance Novels in Modern Poland

    Ștefan Baghiu, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Translationscapes: Romance Language Novels in Ambivalent Romania

    Vlad Pojoga, European Writers: a Comparative Quantitative Landscape

    Stefan Schmidt, Staging Europe’s Eastern Borderlands in the West: Jan Potocki’s Manuscript trouvé à Saragosse

    13:00-15:00: Lunch Break

    15:00-17:30: Panel 2: Poetry Translation and Reception Studies

    Maciej Eder, Distant Reading and Reception Studies: A Few Methodological Remarks

    Stefano Fumagalli, Bridging Metrical Systems: Tommaso Landolfi’s Translations from Lermontov and Tyutchev

    Anastasia Belousova, “Come, Muse, Sit Down with Us on This Canapé”: European Intertextuality in Russian Ottava Rima

    Ksenia Yakubovskaya, Reception of French Poetry in Russia: José-Maria de Heredia’s La fuite des centaures

    Andrei Dobritsyn, The Reception of a Foreign Poetic Language at Different Linguistic Levels and the Perception of Borrowed Elements

    Dușița Ristin, Spiritual Approximation of Contemporary Romanian and Serbian Poetry in Translation

     

    Day 2, July 16, 2025

    9:30-10:45: Keynote Address 2: Petra James, Beyond Classical Models of Cultural Transfers: Soft Diplomacy, Fluid Identities, Multiculturality and Uneven Relations

    10:45–11:00: Coffee Break

    11:00-13:00: Panel 3: Genre Fiction

    Snejana Ung, Magical Realisms in Romania: Where Do They Come From and What Are They Doing Here?

    Michał Mrugalski, The Mystery of the City Mysteries Genre

    Anca Simina Martin, Slavic Vampires Through German and French-Language Lenses: Hans Wachenhusen’s 1878 Der Vampyr. Novelle aus Bulgarien and Marie Nizet’s 1879 Le Capitaine Vampire

    Nuo Chen, A Sacred Horror: The registers of the sublime in Ninety-three and Notes from the Underground.

    Erik Martin, French physiologies and the Russian fiziologičeskij očerk: A Quest for Nature, Objectivity, and Realism (1830s-1850s)

    13:00-15:00: Lunch Break

    15:00-17:30: Panel 4: Literature, Identity, and Cultural Transfer

    Ahmed Metwally Abdalla, The Ottoman Influence on Literary Identity in the Balkans

    Ovio Olaru, The “Basa Other” and Identity in Postmillennial Romanian Poetry

    Maria David, Proust’s Influence on Camil Petrescu and Romanian Modernism

    Vera Polilova, Petrarch in Russia from a Bibliometric Perspective

    Costi Rogozanu, The Founding Fear of Realism: Who Observes the Bourgeois?

    Igor Pilshchikov, “Des mots qui hurlent ensemble”: Tracing the Catchphrase in France and Russia