Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be fraught – ignored, appropriated, or obfuscated - throughout Eastern Europe, the principal location of the Holocaust. As part of European Union accession process, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in and contribute to the already established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This has created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states, because this Holocaust memory has replaced the centrality of communist terror as the dominant…

The current success of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov as internationally renowned installation artists builds on Ilya Kabakov’s work in the Soviet Union. In this talk, Komaromi will explore Kabakov’s artistic relationship to both the Russian and Soviet cultural legacy and the western gaze. Specifically, she will show how Kabakov’s work with found “trash” objects in the 1980s is distinct from similar practices by Robert Rauschenberg and the artists of Arte Povera. Kabakov’s treatment of the theme of trash arose out…

In 1915 Vladimir Mayakovsky shocked the Russian poetry scene with his epic poem "Cloud in Pants." One hundred years later Vadim Astrakhan has not only translated the poem into English in his trademark "modernizing / universalizing" fashion, but also put it on film.  In this film he recites the poem in both Russian and English against a vibrant and unique visual background that conveys the spirit of Russian Avant-garde.   Vadim Astrakhan is a translator and performer from New Jersey.  He is known for his…

In this paper, Professor Morse argues for collecting—meaning collecting variously ephemeral “things” (words, poems, books, writers, traditions, ways of life), but also “collecting” as a mode of writing—as both a pathology and a creative mode typical of unofficial literature and art of the late Soviet period. She focuses on two late-Soviet writers: the poet and critic Vsevolod Nekrasov and the poet, critic, curator and émigré Kulturtraeger Konstantin Kuzminsky. Both Kuzminsky and Nekrasov were true “children of the Thaw” in their obsession with truth-telling, “straight talk” and bracing expose . Along the same lines, they also both…