Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

What makes poetry such a fitting vessel for bringing past trauma into conversation with the present? Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach suggests the mode she has termed lyric witness, which creates a liminal space between documentary and imaginative representation, between what can be remembered and what evades memory, and between an ancestral past and the intergenerational present. She read and discuss poetry from her prize-winning collection The Many Names for Mother (Kent State University Press, 2019) which examines how her Jewish-refugee experience…

“Playing rock music in the USSR was like fighting for freedom. Opposing the hypocrisy and pressure of the Soviet system, musicians tried to build a new Russia without totalitarian ideology, without censorship and the imperialistic pattern of behaviour. Rock was an active cultural and social force. When the USSR collapsed, rock music became part of the mainstream and lost its political influence. But it will surely transform into some new music that has sincere energy in it. And I believe…

On March 6, 1957, Ghana gained its independence from Great Britain. Under the famed leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, the first newly independent sub-Saharan African country had several pressing questions on its plate: Who was Ghanaian? What were the new government’s duty and role to its citizens? Moreover, what would Ghana’s political and economic relationship to the Capitalist and Socialist world be? These questions circulated under the backdrop of black and African liberation, the fight for national and global civil and…

In 1827 Russian poet Pyotr Vyazemsky (1792-1878) wrote in a letter from Paris: Many see patriotism as unqualified praise of everything that is your own. Turgot called this “servant patriotism,” du patriotisme d’antichambre. In our country we could call it “kvas patriotism." Why move false patriotism out of the antechamber and into the realm of food and drink? This invocation of kvas—that most Russian of thirst-quenching drinks—is not accidental, and the concept of kvas patriotism has continued…

In April 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded and sent upwards of 50 million curies into the surrounding environment. Working through archives, Brown encountered many contradictory accounts of the disaster and its effects. Realizing that though people and archives lie, trees probably don’t, she turned to scientists—biologists, foresters, physicians and physicists—to help her understand the ecology of the greater Chernobyl territories and the health effects that ensured. She learned working in the swampy territory around the blown plant that…

Although Russia has an extensive tradition of dairy products including fresh cheese, ripened and aged cheeses were introduced from abroad at least by the seventeenth century, and they immediately took on all sorts of new meanings. Cheese was a commodity, an object of international trade. Cheese was the product of technology that Russians came to hope to master. And cheese was part of the world of taste and cultural change, finding its place on the tables of the elite and,…