Featured
Yelena Khanga, Belonging, and Blackness in Russia
Early in Episode 694 of the This American Life podcast, "Get Back to Where You Once Belonged," hosts Emanuele Berry and Ira Glass are watching clips from the 1936 Soviet...
Open Letter on the Termination of Russian Studies Faculty at Ohio University
Like you, we are wholeheartedly invested in the survival and recovery of higher education in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic. That recovery depends on the will of universities...
Person or Persons Unknown
Everyone loves to be proven right, but novelists don’t often expect it — especially five hundred years after the period where their books are set. After all, that’s half the...
"One Soldier’s War" and the New Literary War Hero
In literature and in real life, there is a new type of veteran. From the West’s GWOT (Global War on Terror) "hitters" to the generation Russia lost to Chechnya, the...
Day One of “Hegel to Russia and Back”: Master, Slave, Falling Stones and Russian Hegelians
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...
Talking with Geoff Cebula, Author of "Adjunct"
I knew from the beginning that I didn't want her to be a Slavist.
Asceticism and Embodiment: Female Bodies, Sexuality, and Religious Experiences in Contemporary Russian Women’s Writing
Despite the constantly shifting landscape of women’s involvement and engagement with Orthodoxy and the Church, those seeking to reconcile female religious subjectivity and current Church dogmas—particularly as articulated by reactionary...
Viy as Dracula: Selling “Russian literature” One More Time
Just imagine the clash of civilizations when the two parties drink together; eventually, the rational Englishman starts seeing irrational things—all the ugly monsters, demons, and witches that contemporary CGI can...
Reinventing the Soviet Past: Actor Pavel Derevyanko's "Positive Heroes"
In the series "Dark Side of the Moon" (2011-) and in the film "Salyut-7" (2017), historical and biographical truth take a backseat to the aesthetic and ideological needs of the...
The "Doctor Oz" of Russia
Have you ever wondered why Babushkas fear the draft more than any pathogen?
Russia vs. PornHub: Lie Back and Think of the Motherland
Apparently, people would rather do anything else—watch porn, have gay sex—than engage in heterosexual intercourse.
Sex and Death in Věra Chytilová's "Daisies" (1966)
Questions of individualism, waste, superfluousness, apathy, and death, at the forefront of Chytilová's exploration of social conditions in mid-century Czechoslovakia, remain eminently relevant not only to the country's “communist” period,...
Governing Religion, Mobilizing Faith: Conference Recap
The Jordan Center's first all-day conference of the fall on Friday October 18th: "Governing Religion, Mobilizing Faith"
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata on Stage: Domestic Violence and the Economics of Pity, Part II
Pity is weird. We happily extend it to strong figures but we’re stingy with the weak, with actual “victims.”
Canada, Hockey, and the Cold War
What had begun as score-settling with upstart pretenders to Canada’s pre-eminence acquired its epic qualities because the victory came over the Soviet Union, the hegemon of the Communist bloc.
Sex secrets of the Russian classics
Reason #137 to study Russian literature: apparently, it will teach children about sex. This is a good thing, because no one else in Russia seems to want to.
Universal Pictures: Zvyagintsev, Dostoevsky and the Politics of the Particular
By the end of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, I wanted to scream.
“Happy Birthday, Mr. Putin!”: celebrating political masculinity in Russia
A key element of Vladimir Putin’s legitimation strategy has been the cultivation of a macho image.
Shaving Eisenstein in Manhattan
An old-fashioned shave, with a razor that in Russian they call “dangerous”; an uncannily private scene performed under an open sky, 800 feet over the sidewalks of the greatest city...
Cold Snap (Part II): Russian Film after Leviathan
An auteurist orientation, therefore, is neither good nor bad, but it is certainly mismatched to an industry—especially during periods of robust growth—in which so-called “spectators’ cinema” [zritel'skoe kino] is in...