Caroline Bassett

My research interests lie in the intersection between literary studies and cultural history in the context of the early Soviet Union, and particularly in the relationship between culture and ideology.

I am currently working on a dissertation that analyses the representation of blood in a variety of literary texts, artworks, scientific writings, and ideological and philosophical tracts produced in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, with a focus on conceptualising blood as a creative and productive substance. I use a close-reading approach to argue for the significance of blood as both material and metaphor in Bolshevik ideology, art, and politics, and ask how blood was understood and portrayed during a time of mechanistic conceptualisations of the human body. This work is interdisciplinary and, by targeting a wide range of Russian-language primary sources, aims to produce a detailed understanding of what blood meant in this period of history - a time which was characterised by violence, yes, but also by immense creativity and utopian experimentation.

This work is funded by a Faculty of Arts scholarship from the University of Bristol.