Aging in Slavic Literatures is a well-orchestrated, edited collection of essays that explores diverse representations and illustrations of old age, the complexity of aging processes, and attitudes towards aging in literary works by writers of Slavic origins.

The twelve essays in the collection move across a wide cross section of narrative genres from short story, to novel, to autobiography, to memorialist fiction, and across a large variety of historic, geographic, and cultural landscapes. The collection achieves its goal of reversing misconceptions and stereotypical views of old age through attentive analyses of literary works with complex characters and intricate life journeys treating previously unexplored themes such as the discovery of erotic love in aging women (Maria Geiger Zeman & Zdenko Zeman), male sexuality, homoeroticism, and creativity in old age (Ireas Leben), issues of memory and ethical choices at the end of life (Liana Goletiani), and the experience of age in exile and through the processes of displacement and homecoming (Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl). Whether highlighting the notions of “coming to terms with old age” (Irina Savkina), positive or contradictory views of old age as a period of new opportunities and new beginnings, a socially determined, highly subjective category (Zeman & Zeman, Dimitrios Meletis), or the reversal of gender stereotypes about men and women aging differently and being valued differently based on their age (Ilaria Remonato), an almost continuous thread that runs through the collection is the interpretations of old age in light of social constructs of gender. The entirety of the collection unfolds within a solid and beautifully-woven theoretical framework consisting of gender, queer, and cultural studies. Besides its valuable and original treatment of the theme of aging in creative fiction and non-fiction from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovakia, the importance of this edited volume also lies in bringing to light little-known or neglected works (some of which have been made available in English especially for the creation of this study), next to works by renowned transnational authors such as Vladimir Nabokov or Milan Kundera.

The wide array of genres and literary works examined in the study Aging in Slavic Literatures, from novels, to poetry, to popular autobiography, to memoirs, to chronicles and epistolary works is matched by an expansive historical span that moves from early modern documents in Old Russian, to Renaissance Croatia, to classical Poland, across Russian modernism to the present. Thus, the various analyses of representations of age are situated within specific historical contexts, and particular attention is given to the specificity of philosophies and conceptions of aging, sometimes as representative of their historical, geographical and cultural contexts and more often than not as subverting ageist and sexist attitudes towards aging in their respective times. Such examples of refreshing views of aging as a period of new opportunities but also of great contradictions are the study of Vedrana Rudan's novel The Skeletons of Madison County, the analysis in Adelaida Gercyk's prose sketch On Old Age, or in the attentive explorations of the relations between sexuality, the body, and aging in works by three Slovene writers. Close textual analyses of poignant literary works such as the novel Jakiv's Century by Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Lys, or of “homecoming narratives” in Nabokov's novel Mary, or Kundera's novel Ignorance, explore with subtlety and philosophical depth the theme of aging as seen through the experiences of the trauma of war and, respectively, of exile and displacement, as filtered through the characters’ and narrators’ memory. Questions of identity and the representations of complex relations between time, space, and old age throughout the Soviet era, with its specific chronotopes throughout the communist period, are explored in nuanced ways in the article about “Rasputin's and Trifonov's Old Characters” (Remonato).

Noteworthy of mention is the seamless combination of extensive research and refined theoretical framing with fluid and elegant prose that characterizes all the articles gathered in it. Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl's edited collection of essays Aging in Slavic Literatures is an extremely valuable study that engages in lucid critical inquiry of the theme of aging across a rich section of traditions, historical and cultural universes and valorizes complex, positive and non-stereotypical representations of old age in works of Slavic literature. The study is a valuable resource for students and scholars alike and for all those interested in the topic of aging in general.