Featured
What “Shooter” Gets Wrong about Russian Conspiracies: The Real Thing Is Way Worse.
To make a long story short, the Ukrainian President is shot in the face by a sniper, and Bob Lee is framed.
Tolstoy's Double, Part I
When Tolstoy wrote fiction he became alive to himself, conscious and capable of accessing otherwise obscure depths and fields of thought and feeling. Writing Anna Karenina continually unsettled him.
Tolstoy's Double, Part II
Tolstoy was sensitive and impressionable, but if a war, a guillotining, an autopsy or a famine was happening nearby, he wanted to see it for himself.
Gender Dynamics in the Russian Imperial Army during the First World War
Flagging commitment to masculinist patriotism, alongside resurgent patriarchal peasant ideals, may have accelerated mass desertion from the Russian Imperial Army in the First World War and hastened the revolutions of...
The Ballad of Sonya and Louie: An Immigrant Story
I had thought my family was Russian, but then when I went to college, I found out we were just Jews.
A Coat of Not Many Colors: Vatnik (Russia' Alien Nations)
Vatnik takes visual inspiration from SpongeBob (he is roughly the same shape) and satirical inspiration from the work of Seth McFarlane.
Love (Not Death): A Postmodern Tolstoy in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina
Despite flaws of both execution and interpretation, this most recent adaptation displays a genuinely intelligent understanding Tolstoy’s novel.
Spies in the House of Rock
We end up with a CIA whose power and effectiveness would bring joy to Dick Cheney’s latest heart and prompt him to shoot another friend in the face in celebration.
Marital Happy Endings and Cultural Politics in a Contemporary Australian Adaptation of Anna Karenina
In our time, there is a definite expectation that people know what they want and ensure their own happiness.
Candid about the Camera: Tolstoy Scholars on Adapting Anna Karenina
Tolstoy can be so unforgiving with his ladies.
Immigrant Stories: A New Rubric at All the Russias
It seems like a good time to take pride in the diverse immigrant roots of our field by gathering immigrant stories.
Try a Little Tenderness: An Immigrant Story
All I have left from the first 14 years of my life is an envelope of old photographs.
Passover 1934: An American Jewish Immigrant Story
As historians, most of the time we tell stories about strangers.
An interview with Donna Orwin on her new book, "Simply Tolstoy"
We heard that Donna Orwin had just published a new book called "Simply Tolstoy" and had to find out all about it.
Dancing Bear, Bring Me My Vodka! (Russia's Alien Nations)
The Barber of Siberia is not just a drag; it's a drag show.
The Last Will and Testament of Sergei Esenin: Cultural History of a Mystification, Part II
On October 9th, 1927, already after the tragic death of Duncan herself, and again in the Sunday supplement to Hearst’s newspapers, there appeared yet another article, undoubtedly from the same...
The Last Will and Testament of Sergei Esenin: Cultural History of a Mystification, Part III
In the end, he was released as partially insane, for it was noted that he considered himself an incarnation of the Buddha and believed that he desperately needed money to...
Teaching Race in Russia: Dispatches from “The Harlem Renaissance: From New York to Tashkent”
Why do American race relations reappear over and over again in discussions of the minority experience in the former Soviet Union?
Porn for Peace: Ending the War in Ukraine While Riding a Dolphin
In a world where brother battles brother, and Russia and Ukraine find themselves in a virtual state of war, Only One Man could restore peace and harmony. One Man. Sandwiched...
Dostoevsky, Demons, and The Donald
It’s never a good sign when real life resembles a Dostoevsky novel.