Featured
Irina Sandomirskaja discusses cultural significance of Russian icon in Soviet context
On March 13, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Irina Sandomirskaja, Professor of Cultural Studies at Södertörn University, to present a paper entitled “Originating...
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...
Why Talk About Regional Leadership in a Time of War?
Will a major power always hurt smaller nations simply because it can and wants to, ignoring all rules and obligations? Or will the major power build a more complex relationship with smaller nations that are ultimately beneficial to both sides?
Teymur Ateşli: A Traitor-Hero for the Cold-War Era
For an ethnically Turkish man from the Soviet Union, fighting with the Nazis was no betrayal.
Ideas That Plague Us: Reading “Crime and Punishment” as a Pandemic Narrative, Part I
The motif of illness runs through Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and accompanies key developments and themes—so much so that the novel can be read as a pandemic or plague narrative.
Ideas That Plague Us: Reading “Crime and Punishment” as a Pandemic Narrative, Part II
It is ironic that Raskolnikov justifies selecting the old woman as his victim because she is economically unproductive and sick. Raskolnikov is himself perpetually ill, does not work, and relies on charity from the women in his life.
Waste and Post-Soviet Transition in the Fiction of Liudmila Petrushevskaia
Images of waste in late Soviet and post-Soviet culture can function as important symbolic markers of Soviet and post-Soviet society in the process of its sociocultural transition.
3 Questions: Russian intellectual history as a practice and project (Historia Nova Interviews)
What kinds of intellectual projects would be most beneficial for our shared fields?
Rewriting Russian History Through Cinematic Representations of Revolutionary Terrorism
Russian revolutionary terrorism is a perennial subject for state-sanctioned historical reconstruction, receiving a wide variety of treatments in cinema from the early Soviet period to the present day.
Summer Reading Series: Mikhail Zoshchenko's "Sentimental Tales," Part IV
The author pledges to his dear readers that when he recalls certain sentimental scenes—say, the heroine crying over a portrait, or the same heroine mending Apollo Perepenchuk’s torn tunic, or,...
Upcoming Columbia Event
In Search of Empire: the 400th Anniversary of the House of Romanov February 14th-16th 2013 Co-sponsored by the Bakhmeteff Archive, the Harriman Institute, the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia...
Candid about the Camera: Tolstoy Scholars on Adapting Anna Karenina
Tolstoy can be so unforgiving with his ladies.
Talking with Scholarly Publishers (Historia Nova Prize Part II)
What advice would you give a young scholar when submitting a manuscript to your press?
Ksenia Sobchak; or, Who Gets to Lose to Putin in 2018?
Russia could do a lot worse than Ksenia Sobchak. In fact, most countries currently are (not everyone gets to be Canada).
The Leviathan and the Gutter: Gefter.ru interviews NYU's Mikhail Iampolski (Part I)
There’s no law, Putin is absolutely impotent, he can’t do anything. That’s it. All that’s left is to sit there, like a medieval serf, and hope to God that you...
The Leviathan and the Gutter: Gefter.ru interviews NYU's Mikhail Iampolski (Part II)
It’s all very sad, I think. The capacity for thought has already disappeared, and now dignity is gradually being snuffed out, but I don’t see any solutions. People still depend...
Speak, Memory: The Case of Yuri Dmitriev, Part I
Dmitriev spent a good part of the 1990s in FSB archives examining case files on purge victims. After finding gaps in the lists, he asked for protocols from NKVD “troikas”...
UFOs after the USSR (Russia's Alien Nations)
It doesn’t hurt that the alien visitor happens to look like he would be equally at home in either his spaceship or on the cover of Tiger Beat.
Review: Olga Zilberbourg's English-Language Debut, "Like Water and Other Stories"
In both content and form, Zilberbourg’s "Like Water" expands the boundaries of Russian-American fiction, showing new ways of writing immigrant lives.
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...