Holly Myers is an Assistant Professor of Russian in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Languages. Her research and teaching interests are in Russian and Soviet literature and culture, including international trends in documentary modes; artistic representations of violence and trauma; environmental humanities; intersections between literature and music; and cultural expressions of nationalism and national identity. 

Prof. Myers's book manuscript “Telling and Retelling a War Story: Svetlana Alexievich and Alexander Prokhanov on the Soviet-Afghan War,” examines fluid relationships between truths, authority, facts, and documents in the unusual hybrid literary forms that each writer has produced and then repeatedly revised, from the 1980s to the present day. Unlike the Russian Civil War or World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War did not gain a stable narrative in Russian culture. As a result, its literary representations—and interpretations of these representations—have been especially sensitive to evolving political realities and agendas. Located on opposite sides of the political spectrum, Alexievich and Prokhanov tell competing narratives of the so-called “forgotten war.” The aesthetic decisions Alexievich and Prokhanov have made in revising their Soviet-Afghan war stories over the decades since the war ended reflect and respond to the larger polarization of post-Soviet society in Belarus and Russia. The relationships between implied author and implied reader in their respective texts thus become competing political statements about the relationship between state and citizen in the post-Soviet space.