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Daniel Mellis and Eugene Ostashevsky recreate Vasily Kamensky’s Tango with Cows
On October 30, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed visual artist Daniel Mellis and Russian-American poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky to speak on their...
Russian Meddling and Fake News, Part One: Sell Me More Diapers and Napkins, Please
“Russian affairs” have became a hot topic taken up by writers who lack the proper expertise or necessary restraint
Russian Meddling and Fake News, Part Two: Fearless Hybrid Defense
Putin walks down the lines of computers staffed with guys in uniform and directs them personally: “Hurt Hillary more! Spur racial discord further! Support Trump!”
Russian Meddling and Fake News, Part Three: The Counter-Counter-Counterintelligence State
Unlike the USSR, Russia is not a treasure trove of intelligence talent (which is needed to produce powerful active measures), nor does it espouse an ideology that distinguishes friends from...
Russian Meddling and Fake News, Conclusion: Some Recommendations
The Russian threat is much more dangerous inside Russia.
Steppe School: The Late Russian Empire and Kazakh Agriculture
In 1894, Vasily A. Saenko arrived in the small town of Zaisan in what is today far eastern Kazakhstan to take charge of the Zaisan Kazakh Agricultural School. For several...
First as Tragedy, then as Kitsch: A Bitter Harvest Review
In the middle of a party, Stalin inexplicably shouts “Damn those Ukrainians!”
Is "fake news" fake news?
We are in a panic about the very means that are used to spread panic.
Russian Meddling and Fake News, Part Four: The Curse of Glory
Nobody in Moscow cares about what really happens in the United States.
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?
Socrates in Russia, Part I
The story of Socrates has long been a vessel for interpretation. Philosophers, writers, and artists in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Soviet and post-Soviet space have actively participated in this process,...
Literature and Reality, with Robert Chandler
On a trip to Moscow to meet with Vasily Grossman’s granddaughter, Robert Chandler recalled seeing a room with Grossman’s things. There, the translator was shocked to see the same line...
V.V. Andreev’s Velikorusskii Orchestra: National Identity and Music in Late Imperial Russia
Anya Shatilova writes about Vasily Andreev, “a self-taught balalaika player” who in 1888 organized the Society of Balalaika Devotees in order to “manifest the ‘Russian national idea’ in musical form.
The Art of Empathy: An Interview with Russian Graphic Artist Victoria Lomasko
What we need right now in Russia are some hybrid forms of journalism that can address the problems with actually existing journalism.
"Aspic" by Tatyana Tolstaya
Darkness comes early. There is a damp frost; you can see spiky halos around the streetlamps. You have to breathe through your mittens. Your forehead aches from the cold, and...
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...
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...
Cultural Despair and the Soviet Seventies
In today’s United States, the '70s seem close at hand. After Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, Foreign Policy asked if the country was once again facing “the geopolitical malaise...
War and Pestilence: The Epidemiological Motif in L. N. Tolstoy's Historical Epic
In the motivic structure of "War and Peace," the “mythical” French "grippe" of Anna Petrovna Scherer occupies a unique position. It is a simultaneously socio-linguistic, satirical, historical, moral, and providential...
The Last Will and Testament of Sergei Esenin: Cultural History of a Mystification, Part I
In this article, I’d like to turn away from heated debates over Esenin’s alleged “killers,” or unprofessional falsifiers of literary history, toward an apparently calmer place. I will focus on...