The Barber of Siberia is not just a drag; it’s a drag show.
Continue reading...“He’s Russian. That Explains a Lot”: Nikita Mikhalkov’s Magnificent Flop (Russia’s Alien Nations)
Eliot Borenstein
New Book, New Blog: Russia’s Alien Nations
Eliot Borenstein
As some of you know, I spent a couple of years writing the first draft of “Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism” on my blog (plotsagainstrussia.org). Now that the book is coming out (from Cornell University Press, this March), I’m back to work on my next projects. And one of them is…another book whose rough draft will be posted on a blog.
Continue reading...Announcing Two New Features on “All the Russias”
Maya Vinokour
Happy New Year, “All the Russias” readers! In my capacity as blog editor, I am pleased to announce two new features for 2019.
Continue reading...Russian Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Christopher Tremoglie
In the United States, the Christmas season is winding down — or concluded depending on whom you speak to. The “most wonderful time of the year” typically ends after the celebration of New Year’s on January first. Yet, in Russia, the Christmas holiday is just beginning.
Continue reading...Person or Persons Unknown
Carolyn J. Pouncy
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 fun of writing and reading fiction: filling in the gaps left by the historical record. So to have a set of novels that explore the relationship between Russians and Tatars in the sixteenth century twice intersect with contemporary developments is surprising.
Continue reading...Between Soviet Homeland and Yiddish Cosmos: Yevgeniy Fiks at the Stanton Street Shul
Oksana Rosenblum
Yevgeniy Fiks’ solo exhibition “Himl un erd: Yiddish Cosmos” at Stanton Street Shul in New York (on view Sundays from 1–6pm, Mondays & Wednesdays from 4–7 pm, November 18–December 16) explores the connections between the twentieth-century experience of Eastern European Jews and the Soviet space program. What unites these two seemingly unrelated stories?
Continue reading...A New Companion for Readers of Dostoevskii
Katherine Bowers, Connor Doak and Kate Holland
Today, “All the Russias” features an interview with the editors of “A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts,” a new volume out this month from Academic Studies Press.
Continue reading...The Competing Campaigns of the Russian Opposition
Yana Gorokhovskaia
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. But recent infighting among different opposition groups may stymie their efforts even before the campaign begins.
Continue reading...Conflict Between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Kremlin Authority, Part II
Robert Person and Aaron Brantly
An independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church free from Moscow’s control has long been a goal for many in Ukraine, especially among Ukrainian nationalist organizations. Demands for such a split from the Russian Orthodox Church have only intensified since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and its ongoing proxy war in the Donbas. Today, many Ukrainian politicians, journalists and researchers accuse the Russian Orthodox Church of using its churches in Ukraine to support the Kremlin’s political-information warfare (often referred to as “hybrid war”) against Kyiv. There is also evidence that Russian clergy provided assistance to rebel forces in Ukraine’s East.
Continue reading...Conflict Between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Kremlin Authority, Part I
Robert Person and Aaron Brantly
On October 11, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I – considered the spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide – set in motion a process to grant independence (or “autocephaly”) to a Ukrainian Orthodox Church seated in Kyiv, thereby freeing it from the control of the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow. Far more than a simple rearrangement of the religious furniture in the Orthodox house, the decision has touched off an intense political firestorm in Ukraine and Russia that threatens to open a new – and possibly violent – front in the ongoing conflict between the Ukrainian and Russian governments.
Continue reading...Teaching Chekhov in the Time of Trump
Anne Lounsbery
Chekhov’s stories model a certain way of being in the world. One might describe them as incorrigibly humanist, humanist in the most uncool sense. You can choose to interpret Chekhov in ways that make his texts more difficult than they really are, especially if you subscribe to the Modernist tenet that high art is all about difficulty. But I think if you do so you’re failing to experience what’s best and most important about the stories, which is simply their call to look humbly for truth, to attend carefully to ordinary life, and to practice ordinary human empathy. The prescriptions here are almost embarrassingly simple—but they are not at all easy.
Continue reading...Enchanting Chaos
Geoff Cebula
Today, an unsettling story by Alexander Grin. “To this day, an old courier stands at the corner of Miscue-Miscreance and Herbivory, having destroyed his youth and the beautiful home life he shared with his beloved wife by taking it upon himself one day to procure a caged bird without pay.”
Continue reading...Researching Russian Conspiracy Theories in the Age of Trump
Eliot Borenstein
A funny thing happened to me while I was writing my book on conspiracy theory and contemporary Russia: my obscure little corner of Russian cultural studies suddenly threatened to become relevant. I started working on this topic somewhere during the George W. Bush presidency, but it took far too many years until I could hang up my own personal “Mission Accomplished” banner.
Continue reading...Our Pushkin?
Emily Wang
Pushkinists know that today is a holiday. The first graduating class of the Tsarkoe Selo Lyceum annually celebrated the anniversary of their first day of school by gathering, drinking, and reminiscing. In its early years, this holiday was suffused with the “Lyceum Spirit” (litseiskii dukh) that earned the graduates a reputation for libertinism and went on to become a watch-word for the secret police.
Continue reading...New York Public Library Appoints Full-Time Slavic Curator
Susan Smith-Peter
On October 15, 2018, Bogdan Horbal became the full-time Slavic curator at the New York Public Library. He holds a Ph.D. in history from University of Wrocław in Poland and an MLS from Queens College. Before his appointment, he was head of Technical Processing at the Science, Industry and Business Library. In this post, Susan Smith-Peter interviews Dr. Horbal, who now takes charge of a fantastic collection with much to offer scholars in Slavic Studies and adjacent fields.
Continue reading...Tolstoy’s Double, Part II
Bob Blaisdell
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.
Continue reading...Tolstoy’s Double, Part I
Bob Blaisdell
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.
Continue reading...Podcast: The Use of Twitter Bots in Russian Political Communications
Joshua Tucker
Today, “All the Russias” is pleased to feature a podcast recorded during the annual conference of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia). PONARS is a network of over 100 academics, mainly from North America and post-Soviet Eurasia, advancing new approaches to research on security, politics, economics, and society in Russia and Eurasia. Its core missions are to connect scholarship to policy on and in Russia and Eurasia and to foster a community, especially of mid-career and rising scholars, committed to developing policy-relevant and collaborative research.
Continue reading...Private Screening: Darya Zhuk’s “Crystal Swan,” 9 October at NYU
Alla Roylance
Set in 1990s Belarus, “Crystal Swan” is the story of DJ Velya (Alina Nasibullina), a young woman aching to escape her drab life — devoid of hope or even color — for the siren call of Chicago.
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