Abstract: FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity.The FRINGE series is a platform for cross-disciplinary analysis and the development of 'area studies without borders'.'FRINGE' is an acronym standing for Fluidity, Resistance, Invisibility, Neutrality, Grey zones and Elusiveness -categories fundamental to the themes that the Centre supports.The oxymoron in the notion of a 'FRINGE CENTRE' expresses our interest in (1) the tensions between 'area studies' and more traditional academic disciplines; and (2) social, political and cultural trajectories from 'centres to fringes' and inversely from 'fringes to centres'.The series pursues an innovative understanding of the significance of fringes: rather than taking 'fringe areas' to designate the world's peripheries or non-mainstream subject matters (as in 'fringe politics' or 'fringe theatre'), we are committed to exploring the patterns of social and cultural complexity characteristic of fringes and emerging from the areas we research.We aim to develop forms of analysis of those elements of complexity that are resistant to articulation, visualization or measurement.The present volume approaches conceptions of the Russianlanguage literary diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with an emphasis on working 'up' from particular texts and case studies rather than 'down' from preconceived models of diasporic literature.Both older, hierarchical models that posit diasporas as peripheries to a homeland rendered inaccessible, and more recent conceptions, which emphasize the multiplicity of decentred, fluid, hybridized identities, imply particular assumptions about diasporic texts.Notions of nostalgia, preservation or restoration, creative transformation and so on become baked into the analytic model.This volume puts such notions under critical review by examining the ways such models relate to or have been generated by particular texts and authors.