Karolina Parshina, originally from St Petersburg, is an MA student at the Department of Russian Language and Literature, University of Bergen. She did her BA degree at the Department of Russian Language and Literature (Moscow State University, MSU), and wrote her BA thesis on the “Comparison of Russian and German Phraseology in Business Discourse” with Professor Anatoly Kachalkin. Afterwards, she did graduate studies at MSU, focusing on Language Theory and Rhetoric, before moving to Norway in December 2021. Ms Parshina has been living in Bergen since, and enrolled to do her MA at the University of Bergen in the Autumn of 2022. Her MA thesis supervisor is Associate Professor Brita Lotsberg Bryn.
Ms Parshina's research at Bergen investigates the thematic underpinnings of liminality and rituality in the latest novel of Anna Starobinec (aka Starobinets), "Lis'i Brody" (Foxes’ Fords, 2022), through the framework of borderland literature. Starobinec, whose style has been influenced by Neil Gaiman, is recognized as the “Russian Queen of Horror”.
"Lis'i Brody" is an adventure thriller set on the Russian–Manchurian border in 1945. Situated within the genre of magical realism, it includes various mystical features and takes its characters through a series of mundane and existential rituals. Ms Parshina dissects the novel's narrative complexities and character dynamics using the lenses of liminality and rituality. She draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope theory to analyze the interplays of time and space, and Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics to investigate the creation and transmission of meaning within the narrative. Ms Parshina will present the different (geographical, physical, and spiritual) liminal spaces and their associated rituals that make the characters and plot transition from one state to another. She will also discuss how these elements are used by the author to blur the lines between real and magical worlds.