Featured
A Conversation with Julia Phillips, Author of "Disappearing Earth"
Phillips set out to create a work of fiction for American readers set in what, for them, is exotic landscape. She devoted her time in Kamchatka to meeting people, traveling,...
Together, Russia and America Make the Worst Film of the Century
Branded, the recent film written and directed by Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerain, is a shining example for the much-ballyhooed "reset" of Russian-American relations. Bradshaw and Duleriin have proven that...
Kvas Patriotism in Russia: Cultural Problems, Cultural Myths
Professor Brintlinger's argument is developed along three ideas: Russian ideas about food become heightened during times of war and conflict; specific foods embody meaning beyond their sustenance value, to include...
The Great Chernobyl Acceleration
One researcher in search of definitive answers to long-term health effects from Chernobyl has a radical idea about how to accelerate cleanup of the accident’s contamination: Buy the radioactive berries...
Energy Aesthetics: Force, Flow, and En-tropy in Russian Culture
Literature, visual arts, popular science brought together Russian scholars in fields ranging from visual arts to literature to anthropology. The aim of the interdisciplinary symposium was to examine “energy as...
The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects
Soldiers are constructing whatever they can: Oil cans become stoves, artillery shells become kerosene lamps, overcoat fabric becomes wicks. Government officials regularly checked these trench “cities” for proper ventilation, light,...
How the Female Russian Nihilist Became a Tenacious Archetype
A sensational story about a Russian nihilist bomb plot gripped the imagination of the French reading public for a week in the autumn of 1906. The biggest mass-circulation newspapers published...
Lady's Choice (Turkish Gambit 6)
Fandorin sounds less like Akunin and more like Yuliya Latynina
Russian scholars explore the use of the term 'biopolitics' in Jordan Center-UCL workshop series
What work is biopolitics doing as a heuristic in the Russian field?
Minds and Bodies in the World, or: Learning to Love Dostoevsky
I'm not one of those American Slavists who came to the study of Russian literature by way of Dostoevsky. For a long time, I wasn’t even particularly interested—I’m afraid that...
Putin: the man who arranges the blocks
The entirely brilliant Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris by Pig With The Face Of A Boy, encapsulates what we could call Russia’s long...
How (Not) to Talk About Roma
Kicking off a week of what proved to be atypically prodigious journalistic commentary on what is commonly referred to as the “plight of the Roma (or Gypsies)” or “the Roma...
“I’ll Buy the Wife Some Boots" (Russia's Alien Nations)
The aesthetic of the MMM commercials is sovok from start to finish.