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Andrei Zorin's Sandglass
All creative works are autobiographical, but they are autobiographical in their own way. As part of NYU’s commemoration of the War of 1812, the Jordan Center was pleased to welcome...
Spring Reading Series: Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Beyond Tula," Part I
"Beyond Tula" has a transparently insignificant plot: a young writer from the city comes to visit his engineer friend in the country for a couple of days, and everything ends...
Spring Reading Series: Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Beyond Tula," Part II
Railroad engineers used to refer to tracks in the feminine: “get up on her,” they’d say about the fifth track, or “she’s a tough one, the eleventh.”
Spring Reading Series: Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Beyond Tula," Part III
Darya Fyodorovna came in and asked whether to serve them dinner, but the co-op operator was loping dreamily around the room. A porcelain Easter egg was hanging in the corner...
The St. George's Ribbon and National Insanity
Today’s owner of a German car shares his identity with his grandfather, who fought the Nazis.
Red Goes Green: A Contemporary Ecological Reading of a Soviet Classic
“Pkhents,” written by Abram Tertz, the pen name of Andrei Sinyavsky, is the story of an incognito extraterrestrial stranded in the Soviet Union. He’s not one of the stereotypical little...
Heroes and Zeros: Ded Moroz and Yuri Olesha
Who's your hero: Yuri Olesha, Ded Moroz, or Tyler Durden?
New Men in Love (Russia's Alien Nations)
The "New People suffer from a socialist version of the “terrible perfection” Barbara Heldt identified as the defining flaw of nineteenth-century Russian heroines
A Hothouse Flower in a Communal Apartment (Russia's Alien Nations)
Sinyavsky exploits the alien metaphor to the fullest by making his narrator an exotic plant that can barely survive in the harsh Moscow winter and the harsher Soviet communal apartment.
Aristocrats from Outer Space (Russia's Alien Nations)
An Ayn Rand hero from outer space
Narratives of Childbirth in Tolstoy’s "War and Peace"
I started to wonder if the very fact that there is not much to Liza’s birth scene might precisely be the point. Because, while a birth scene can be understood...
Cold Snap (Part I): Russian Film after Leviathan
This essay provides context for roughly thirty-five current and upcoming Russian films, loosely clustered around four topics: directors; debuts; economic health; and dominant industry trends.
The Man Who Has Everything (Russia's Alien Nations)
These novels include: transparent alien artifact hunters, a lost tribe of yeti, and a cryogenically frozen Adolf Hitler maintained by a colony of cloned Valkyries on a secret Antarctic base
Running from the Reds: An Immigrant Story
This was my heritage: cultured, formerly wealthy Russians trying to make it in New York.
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...
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...
Between Sustainability and Development in Romania
Romanians have become increasingly aware of their environmental difficulties. Today, news of deforestation represents a regular part of the Romanian news cycle and is a hobbyhorse in the House of...
Workers Against the Workers’ State, Part II
"Dear Comrades!" won a special jury prize at the Venice film festival in September 2020. A one-hour promotional video follows Konchalovsky and Vysotskaya as they cavort through luxury locations in...
Vanishing Act: Evasive Storytelling in Platonov’s “The Lunar Bomb” (1926)
Andrei Platonov's fictional works are difficult to categorize squarely within one genre. While his later works adhere more closely to realism, his works from the 1920s range from science fiction...
Ales Bialiatski: A Moral Choice We Hope Never to Face
Ales Bialiatski’s was one of the strangest Nobel lectures in history. Not only did the laureate not write it himself, he did not deliver it—at the time of the ceremony,...