African American Hope for Russian Culture? Feminist Ambitions and Racial Ambivalence in Evgeniia Nekrasova’s Skin

Abstract This article examines Evgeniia Nekrasova’s Skin ( Kozha , 2021) by situating the novel within key transformations in 2020s Russian culture, particularly within the rise of feminist discourses and digital literary experimentation. Through a close reading of the novel’s narrative structure, language experiments, and reception, this article analyzes the device of skin exchange between a Russian serf and an enslaved African American woman as a metaphor for cultural transformation and equivalence. It argues that the novel mobilizes African American women’s literature as a powerful model, positioning racial difference as a transferable form of cultural capital. Drawing on feminist and decolonial scholarship, this article offers a critical intervention into debates on race, feminism, and post/decoloniality in Russian studies by examining how race becomes a mobile and adaptable idiom through which cultural producers imagine aesthetic innovation, moral authority, and commercial success. This dynamic is conceptualized as a cultural logic in which anti‐racist and feminist vocabularies are integrated into entrepreneurial self‐branding and market‐oriented literary production, revealing tensions between social critique and commodification in post‐Soviet feminist writing.