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Philippa Hetherington explores anti-trafficking rhetoric in a Soviet and global context
On April 22, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Philippa Hetherington from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London for...
“Dead Men Don’t Read Tolstoy. A Philip Marlowe Mystery”
“And the students? Didn’t they deserve a little Nabokov?”
#quitseelangs
If you say the word SEELANGS to a Slavist, they will most likely respond by rolling their eyes.
The Americans: The Marriage Plot against America
Even if our heroes survive the season, their future looks bleak.
The Americans: "Take Your Daughter to Work" Day
Previously, on the Walking Dead…
Getting One Thing Straight: “Postmodernists” Are Not the Problem
Discussions of Trump and Putin as “Postmodern politicians” come in many different forms and degrees of sophistication. My own modest contribution is intended only to dispel a bit of confusion...
A New Translation of Yuri Tynianov's "Interlude" (1924)
Today, an excerpt from a new translation of Yuri Tynianov's essays by Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko, out this fall from Academic Studies Press in a collection titled "Permanent Evolution:...
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...
Putin wants a shining legacy. He has to solve 3 big problems first.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has just started his new term in office and is mulling how to secure his legacy. In his fourth and likely last term, he will be...
New Book, New Blog: Plots against Russia
I'm posting my new book to a blog as I write it, in real time.
The Post-Soviet Future of FX's The Americans: A Modest Proposal
It’s time for The Americans to jump the shark.
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.
Fall Reading Series: Sergei Gandlevsky's "Illegible," Part I
In contemporary Russian literary life, Gandlevsky’s stature as a poet is indisputably great; he is less well known as a prose writer, although his novels and essays have been critically...
All the Russias: A Transnational Approach
A new approach underpins "Transnational Russian Studies," edited by Andy Byford, Connor Doak, and Stephen Hutchings, just published by Liverpool University Press. Our book opens up the map of Russian...
Forgetting Eduard Limonov: The New York Times’ Obituary Epic Fail
Limonov was most famous for gay sex and supporting Bosnian genocide, neither of which the NYT saw fit to mention
Putin's Game of Thrones
The poisoning of Aleksei Navalny is a grim reminder that Russian politics seems to operate by its own set of rules.
Time of Troubles; or, The Trouble with Time (Unstuck in Time)
The outcome of a Time of Troubles is a foregone conclusion
Quantum Leaps or Quantum Entanglement? (Unstuck in Time)
No one is at all bothered by the idea of paradoxes resulting from the deaths of butterflies, grandfathers, or Hitlers
Book Review: Yuri Tynianov's "Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory, and Film"
Despite his sizable contributions to Russian Formalism, Yuri Tynianov remains a largely understudied figure in the West. Whether a victim of canonization or cross-cultural barriers, his work continues to evade...
Vladimir Putin: Pauper or Princeling?
If Vladimir Putin did indeed come from a family with ties to the Soviet nomenklatura, that would illuminate the role of personal connections in an allegedly egalitarian and meritocratic society....