Salt Babies: Narrating Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature

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Salt Babies: Narrating Maternity in Slavic and Comparative Literature is a planned research network which will connect Slavic Studies scholars, active in Maternal Studies, with wider disciplinary fields. Through two academic conferences and three public seminars held over nine months in Lithuania and the UK, complemented by a range of related events and publications, we shall interrogate received understandings of maternal experience and behaviour, while re-opening dialogue about how contemporary literatures and cultures reflect motherhood. As the Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator share expertise in Slavic literature, literary and cinematic culture are the main foci of our research questions; additionally, this approach enables our network to address the long-term marginalization of Maternal Studies within Slavic Studies. Our title "Salt Babies" derives from Russian author Isaak Babel's 1926 short story "Salt", an account (set during the Russian Civil War) of a woman who persuades Cossack soldiers to let her ride their train by pretending to nurse an infant. As they venerate nursing mothers, the soldiers let her travel unmolested; but when her unnaturally peaceful "baby" is exposed as a sack of smuggled salt, they fling her off the train and shoot her. Our title also references Anne Fine's influential children's novel "Flour Babies" (1992), in which a class of disruptive boys learn to model good parental practice by nurturing bags of flour for two weeks. Both stories show how "good", nurturing maternal behaviour is culturally enshrined in their respective contexts; but, by also demonstrating that maternal behaviour can be faked, they expose the vulnerability and fluidity of our ideals of motherhood. This inspires the network's key questions:1. How do cultural (primarily, but not exclusively, literary) representations of motherhood differ between former Soviet nations and the West? How does the public perception of motherhood differ?2. How do methodological approaches to Maternal Studies, especially to maternal fictions, differ between Slavic Studies and other disciplinary fields?3. How can we use translated maternal fictions effectively to engage the wider public in reflection on maternal experience?The opening two-day academic symposium at the Co-Investigator's institution (Vilnius University, Lithuania), will survey the state of our field, uniting Slavic Studies scholars from different disciplines - sociology, history, literature - in panels chaired by established non-Slavist Maternal Studies scholars, who will later act as mentors for the network's Slavist researchers and as internal reviewers for our outputs. Connections created between Slavists and leading scholars in the wider field of Maternal Studies will stimulate interdisciplinary knowledge exchange within Slavic Maternal Studies, which we will disseminate through (1) a follow-up workshop at the Devon and Exeter Institution (DEI, Exeter) where network members will present and discuss new research and (2) a special Slavic writing-focused issue of the peer-reviewed journal "Studies in the Maternal" which will publish this research, and ultimately an edited volume. "Salt Babies" thus consolidates and extends the work of previous AHRC-funded networks on European motherhood.Three themed public seminars, challenging the prevailing culture of silence around (1) breastfeeding; (2) infant loss; (3) adoption and fostering, are planned for UEA, Norwich; Exeter's former maternity hospital (Poltimore House); and Pasaka Cinema (Vilnius, Lithuania), respectively. Each seminar will link to a relevant Slavic literary/cinematic text; we will invite authors/directors, scholars, and representatives from parental support organizations to lead audience discussion. We will also curate two public exhibitions on maternal experience (a photographic study of working motherhood at Exeter University, and a display about Devon's historical maternity provision at the DEI).