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"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...
Navalny and the Kremlin: Politics and Protest in Russia
On February 1st, the Jordan Center and the Harriman Institute co-hosted a panel on Alexei Navalny as part of the New York--Russia Public Policy Series. Panelists included Yana Gorokhovskaia, Research...
The Competing Campaigns of the Russian Opposition
Next year, opponents of the Kremlin are hoping to recreate the success they achieved during the 2017 municipal election in Moscow — this time in Russia’s northern capital, St. Petersburg....
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...
Tolstoy's Double, Part II
Tolstoy was sensitive and impressionable, but if a war, a guillotining, an autopsy or a famine was happening nearby, he wanted to see it for himself.
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...
Excerpt from "Sex Work in Contemporary Russia: A Cultural Perspective," Part I
The character of the female sex worker has recurred pervasively across time, space, and genre, repeatedly used by writers, filmmakers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians to explore anxieties about the disruptive...
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...
The Politburo Goes Hunting: Masculinity, Nature, and Power in the Soviet Union
Characterized by informality, a tendency to personalize official relationships, and, perhaps above all, by a desire to assert strength and power through a display of manliness, Soviet diplomacy often required...
Is Slavic ready for Minorities?
Very often I’m asked how Slavic Studies can attract more minorities. I’ll tell my own story.
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 Road to Serfdom (Russia's Alien Nations)
The New Russian offers a vision of social stratification that uses capitalism as a way station to serfdom
Tolstoy the Peasant: A "Myth" Revisited
To what extent was the "myth" of Leo Tolstoy-as-peasant purveyed by Ilya Repin merely that—a myth? Was it, in fact, not a myth at all? Tolstoy was no peasant, for...
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...
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.
Circle Games (Unstuck in Time)
Voting Putin back into the presidency made the equation between past and future more literal
The Future is Feudal (Unstuck in Time)
The medieval future, far from being always dystopian, might not even be that bad.
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...
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...
Review: "I Want a Baby and Other Plays" by Sergei Tretyakov, Translated by Robert Leach and Stephen Holland
This new collection of plays by Sergei Tretyakov, translated by Robert Leach and Stephen Holland, attempts to solidify Tretyakov’s role in the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde Canon. In his introduction, Leach...