Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

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 the Russian Avant-garde.   Vadim Astrakhan is a translator and performer from New Jersey.  He is known for…

In this talk Professor Ainsley Morse will present a paper which 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 will focus 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 .…

Jillian Porter explores energy—the “power to make work”—as a shaping force in Tolstoy’s fictions. From the psychic “safety valves” of War and Peace to the steam engines of Anna Karenina and the excesses of The Kreutzer Sonata, the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics provided Tolstoy with a powerful store of metaphors for the workings of minds, bodies, and literary texts. How did Tolstoy’s fascination with thermodynamics arise, and which structural features of his narratives might it help to explain? Do his…

In this talk, I connect Tolstoy’s ideas about gender and sexuality, as reflected in The Kreutzer Sonata, with the main idea born out of his religious conversion: pacifism. For Tolstoy, sexuality came to signify another form of violence, and peaceful living required complete abstinence. Influenced by pacifist thinkers like the Americans William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou, who also embraced feminism, Tolstoy sought a new world order beyond sexuality, defined by peaceful relations between individuals. In contextualizing this new world order, I bring Tolstoy in dialogue with several queer…

In this talk, Dr. Sobolev will explore the behavior and impact of several hundred “trolls” — paid supporters of Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia who were allegedly employed in late 2014 and early 2015 to leave pro-government comments on the popular social media platform LiveJournal. First, he will devise a classification method of the possible objectives that would motivate governments to employ Internet trolls, the strategies trolls use to achieve these objectives, and these strategies' observable implications. Second, combining text…

In the Soviet pantheon of fantasy-machines cameras and guns occupied a special place: if cinema was proclaimed the most important of all arts, then the most powerful cinema was capable of producing “sniper shots” that delivered a fully truthful, objective and scientific image of the world. In this talk Jordan Center visiting scholar Maria Vinogradova explores such metaphors, focusing on the concept and practice of “film-hunting” (kinookhota) as it developed after the 1950s.  In the Soviet film avant-garde the likes…