Featured
Firebird: From Slavic Mythology to American Identity
Originally choreographed by Michel Fokine for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1910, Igor Stravinsky's "Firebird" has been restaged many times and remains a popular ballet around the world and especially in...
Televising Soviet Ballet in the Twenty-First Century
On a day when the news was silent about why the stock market had failed to open, and as protests were unfolding in major cities across Russia, watching ballet on...
Countering "byt" with "bytie": Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Balm for Motherhood
Written in 1995, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s "Medea and Her Children" merges "byt" and "bytie" by portraying the spiritual satisfaction found in the everyday.
All the King's Horses: Ukraine, Russia, and Gogol's Troika
What the rest of the world perceived as a quaint cultural mascot had additional layers of meaning for the Russian public that were overlooked in western media coverage of the...
Ukraine’s ‘far east’: on the effects and genealogy of Ukrainian Galician reductionism
In the context of the current war, faith in the idea of national ‘purity’ often comes couched in rationalist terms, positing no known cure for the Soviet hangover in the...
Russian-Speaking Patriotism in Ukraine: Under-Researched and Misunderstood, Part I
Five factors explain the failure of Putin’s “New Russia” project and clarify why Ukraine did not disintegrate in 2014 despite pressure from the Russian military and hybrid warfare.
Russian-Speaking Patriotism in Ukraine: Under-Researched and Misunderstood, Part II
If Russian speakers represent approximately two thirds of Ukraine’s security forces fighting Russian and Russian proxy forces, and they represent the majority of casualties, any concept of Ukraine as divided...
Scholars Share Ideas on 1821 Greek Revolution
A conference on “1821: What Made It Greek And Revolutionary?".
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.
Undocumented Aliens (Russia's Alien Nations)
“Once again, a UFO has landed in America, the only country UFOs ever seem to land in.”
What About Tomorrow? An Oral History of Russian Punk from the Soviet Era to Pussy Riot
Punk arrived in Soviet Russia in 1978, spreading slowly at first through black market vinyl records and soon exploding into state-controlled performance halls, where authorities found the raucous youth movement...
Reconstructing Stalingrad: The Struggle to Rebuild and Redefine the "Hero City" After 1943, Part II
On Tuesday, June 15, 1943, the front page of "Stalingradskaia pravda" ran a letter to the editor, penned by a group of nineteen women led by a one A. M....
Catherine the Little and Crimean Puppets: From Vandalism to Voodoo in Ukrainian Popular Culture, Part II
Whereas vandalism is programmatically collective and anonymous, voodoo performance requires a priest: an authorial actor and director of the ritual.
A Brief History of an Indo-Soviet Cultural Affair
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s led to the end of an era of robust cultural exchange between Russia and India, but lingering artifacts of this longstanding...
Trauma and the Maternal: Does Tragedy Have a Woman’s Face?
During traumatic events we keep returning to the representations of the maternal, a manifestation of motherly protection, which is often coloured by our childhood fears that such protection will inevitably...
How Will Our Scholarship On Nineteenth-Century Russian Culture Change In Response To Russia's War On Ukraine?
On May 25, 2022, six scholars—all primarily Russia specialists—responded to the question of how scholarship on nineteenth-century Russian culture would change in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The present...
Ukrainian Russophonia: Beyond the "Russian World" Paradigm
As the famous Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov pointed out in a June article for "The New Statesman," the atrocities of recent months have made it quite likely that Russian will...
Very Nice! (Russia's Alien Nations)
Borat exemplifies a particular kind of Soviet and post-Soviet shame
"Socialist Orientalism: Aleksandr Rodchenko’s and Varvara Stepanova’s Ten Years of Uzbekistan", a talk with Nariman Skakov
Rodchenko and Stepanova’s album “Ten Years of Uzbekistan” was commissioned and produced in 1933, with the intent of producing a luxurious folio to commemorate the tenth-year anniversary of the Uzbek...