A more nuanced appraisal of Russia’s relationship with China tells us a great deal about both how Russian elites define their country’s core interests and possible trajectories for Russian foreign policy that bear little resemblance to these grim forecasts.
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When Ryan Fogle, Third Secretary at the American Embassy in Moscow, was arrested for attempting to recruit a Russian security-services officer, the world sat up and took notice. Then it snickered and sat down again.
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As I write this, Moscow is clearing up after the latest Great Patriotic War nostalgia-fest. The Victory Day parade is a chance to remember past glories, drink, wear a pilotka and, for those of us disposed to that kind of thing, ooh and aah at the squat-turreted tanks and phallic missiles clanking and clattering their way through the city.
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What do Americans see when they look at the faces of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev? And do Russians see the same thing?
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On Saturday, April 20, the Poets House hosted a panel discussion on the Russian Avant-Garde, co-sponsored by the Jordan Center. The panel consisted of Anthony Anemone, Polina Barskova, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Peter Scotto, Bela Shayevich, and Matvei Yankelevich, who all gave very interesting accounts of the works and philosophical thinking of Daniil Kharms, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Alexander Vvedensky, and other figures of the Russian avant-garde. Ranging from topics such as authorship, conceptualism, the challenges of translating, and objectification of language, the colloquium offered diverse and knowledgeable presentations to both academic experts and to those yet uninitiated into the absurd world of the Russian avant-garde.
Continue reading...On Monday, April 15, the Jordan Center hosted a movie night featuring the documentary “Russian New York: The New Review,” as part of the celebration of Russian-American History Month in New York. The documentary was made for the 70th anniversary of the famous intellectual journal The New Review, to which some of the most influential figures of the Russian emigre, including Ivan Bunin, Joseph Brodsky, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn contributed on regular basis. Director Alexandra Sviridova’s movie is both personal and informative, and manages to show the important role The New Review has played and still plays in the intellectual lives of Russians abroad.
Continue reading...On Saturday, April 13, day two of the conference “Hegel to Russia and Back,” sponsored by the Humanities Initiative, CUNY and the Jordan Center, took place at NYU. Again brilliant minds met to discuss Hegel’s encounter with and influence on Russia.
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Forgive me for seeming to trivialize a tragic story that has already been overexploited, but I have to ask: has anyone out there noticed how much Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looks like a young Neil Gaiman?
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April 12 marked the opening of the two-day conference “Hegel to Russia and Back,” sponsored by the Humanities Initiative, CUNY, and the Jordan Center. The very first panel, “Wrestling with Hegel: Three Encounters,” was led by Yanni Kotsonis (NYU), and included Irina Paperno (UC Berkeley), Jeff Love (Clemson University), and Katerina Clark (Yale University).
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Today, the Leninskii District court in Kirov (what would those two Bolsheviks have made of it all?) is due to see the start of Alexei Navalny’s case, as he faces charges of embezzling $500,000 through timber sales from the KirovLes enterprise.
Continue reading...On Tuesday, April 9, the Jordan Center had the great honor of hosting some of the most distinguished experts of Russian-American relations, as Ambassador Jack Matlock, Senator Bill Bradley, Mr. Boris Jordan, and Professor Stephen Cohen shared perspectives on the relationship between the two countries during the last two decades. Coming from different backgrounds and disciplines, there was both optimism and pessimism to trace in each of the discussants’ approaches.
Continue reading...On Friday, March 29, the Jordan Center was pleased to welcome a number of speakers to participate in a lively discussion on movements of Greeks and Russians of various sorts around and across the Mediterranean. Colleagues from Greece and the US working on perhaps would be considered an unusual topic had the chance to share work and ideas with great success.
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Sergei Tretyakov, perhaps the most prominent figure in the Soviet factographic movement, was the main hero during Devin Fore’s talk at the Jordan Center on Friday, April 5. Visiting from Princeton University, Fore shared aspects of his study All the Graphs: Soviet Factography and the Emergence of Avant-Garde Documentary with a number of engaged listeners. While Fore’s research outlines the emergence of Soviet factography from its very beginning (for more on this, click here), Friday’s discussion touched upon some of the broader issues related to Fore’s work.
Fore started the colloquium by arguing that the collective knowledge factography produces is in fact sociological, not psychological. His research includes examples from different genres, such as photography, documentary, theater productions and newspapers, yet at the core of his study still lies the quest to show what these all have in common when viewed in connection with Soviet factography. Through the manufacturing and fabrication of film, a media revolution took place side by side with the social turmoil of the Russian 1920s. A temporal information society was formed, having the specious present and the transitional moment as its main foci. Film as medium arose as utterly feral, as it was trying to depict pure presence through visual images and plotless prose. Thus, early factography came to resemble presentness. This is where Fore links his research to Marx’ notion of “animal spirits,” where the collective is seen as a uniform mass. Making the claim that the recognition of the present has more in common with cognition than consciousness, Fore also shows how factography is more concerned with depicting the collective existence as such, than encouraging modes of self-awareness.
This aspect of Fore’s study was given a lot of attention during Friday’s discussion. Several participants questioned Fore’s notion that factography resembles the cognitive collective and tries to move away from depictions of the conscious individual. Fore argued well for himself as he pointed out that his research first of all is concerned with the rise of an information collective. Through focusing on the cognitive, factographic media are also able to depict the emergence of the present, and the contingent nature of society. Instead of focusing on each individual’s experience in a given transitional moment, factography sets out to portray the moment itself. This means that history is still open, and in a constant state of becoming. Factographic history is therefore not predetermined, but instead depicts a temporality without finality. Perhaps is there a form of humanism to be found in factography’s focus on the collective, and its devaluation of individual consciousness as the mode par excellence of representing our perception of the world.
Two days after his body was found by a bodyguard in his Berkshire home, Boris Berezovsky shocks the blogosphere by remaining deceased.
Continue reading...It was a lively and diverse symposium that took place on Friday, March 15, when the Jordan Center in cooperation with the Hagop Kevorkian Center brought together four prolific scholars to talk about diasporas and spaces of movements. Willard Sunderland (University of Cincinnati), Philippa Hetherington (Harvard University), Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (NYU), and Eliot Borenstein (NYU) made an excellent panel, and the participants were presented with new perspectives on both Russia and diasporic movements.
Continue reading...In cooperation with the Hagop Kevorkian Center, the Jordan Center recently hosted another symposium in our ongoing Diasporas Series. On Thursday, March 14, the theme was “The Movement of Ideas,” with special emphasis on the growing influence of neo-liberalism in former Soviet republics, and in Asia. Guest speakers included Gerry Easter (Boston College), Kanchan Chandra (NYU), Barbara G. Katz (NYU), Molly Nolan (NYU), and Steven Solnick (President, Warren Wilson College).
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Nevzorov’s responses to Socbchak’s pointed questions are a study in raw cynicism.
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While lacking the leather-clad explosivity of Road Warrior and the melancholic drone of Red Lights, Sergei Loznitsa puts Russia on the map with his new on-the-road flick, My Joy. Where that road leads is not so clear.
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On Friday, March 1, Emma Hamilton, PhD student in Comparative Literature visited the Jordan Center Colloquium Series where she presented her ongoing dissertation project on films and ruins. Hamilton is at the early stages of her research and the colloquium participants came together to offer perspectives, advice, and expertise at a time when it is most useful. The discussion, like the project, was intriguing.
Hamilton explained how her interest in the topic arose from her fascination with Sergei Eisenstein’s movies on Ivan the Terrible, and their production history. In addition to Eisenstein, Hamilton’s project focuses on movies by other Soviet directors, such as Esfir Shub, Sergei Loznitsa and Andrei Tarkovsky. The selection of movies thus varies greatly in techniques, historical context, and aesthetics, but what they all have in common is that they somehow relate to the overarching theme of Hamilton’s project. Among the categories she is working within are “film made from ruins,” “film as ruin,” and “film in ruins.” Together these serve as the analytical foundation for the more intricate aspects of her dissertation.
At the core of Hamilton’s research lies the complicated question of the heterogenous temporality of films, and their materiality. Like ruins, films are expected to encompass something in the now which has already passed, yet at the same time they are not themselves immune to the ravages of time. We often approach films as safe harbors of the past, but as material objects films are extremely fragile and perishable. Tending to obsess over the idea of the “original film,” we also seem to forget the fact that the film itself is not an unchangeable entity.
While touching upon the difficulties involved with theory of film preservation and restoration, an
interesting dialogue took place regarding how it differs from preservation processes of icons, books, and other textual documents. Often preservation and restoration of such objects involve
reconstructing an authentic original, but as Hamilton points out, film preservation cannot be established on the same premises. Centered around the issues of authenticity, the contingent nature of film seems to affect not only film as medium, but also film as ruin.
