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The Damned Gift of Living: Vasilii Shukshin and the Dying Peasant (with Joy Neumeyer, Jordan Center Visiting Scholar)
Vasilii Shukshin rose from a Siberian village to become one of the late Soviet Union’s most celebrated talents. In the paper for this colloquium, Jordan Center visiting scholar Joy Neumeyer draws on previously untapped archival sources to examine his life, work, and significance. Shukshin won a mass following with stories and films featuring rural eccentrics and city transplants who struggled to find individual freedom in a standardizing age. His characters reveled in life’s beauty but agonized over its meaning; those…
Find out more »From the Soviet Republic to the Planned Economy: Lenin, Socialism, and Cold War Modernity (with Adam Leeds, Columbia University)
Lenin's enigmatic text State and Revolution has been read as both a key to Soviet history and as an irrelevant curio. In this paper, Columbia Professor Adam Leeds will show that the surface of this text manifests two incompatible visions of socialism that reflect an epochal transition then underway. He argues that, in the early nineteenth century, socialism meant a form of radicalized democratic republicanism, in contrast to which even the freest existing states were only corrupted bourgeois oligarchies. Socialism’s first republican…
Find out more »How to Make Precarious Russia Habitable – or, What Russians Want in Putin’s Fourth Term (with Jeremy Morris, Aarhus University)
In this talk, Professor Jeremy Morris will present ethnographic research he carried out in ‘small town’ Russia and beyond since 2009. Professor Morris will review the main ideas of his book Everyday Postsocialism: that even in contexts characterised by deindustrialisation, loss, and precarity, ordinary people do more than just ‘get by’ – they actively make their social environment habitable in numerous ways. Solidarities, networks and moral values inherited from the socialist period are important, but so too are ‘new’ phenomena like…
Find out more »Ilya Kabakov and the Rubbish Heap of History (with Ann Komaromi, University of Toronto)
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…
Find out more »Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (with Jelena Subotic, Georgia State University)
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…
Find out more »Activism Rising: Ukraine at a Turning Point (with Oleg Sentsov and Nina Khrushcheva)
PEN America and the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia Present: A conversation with filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and scholar Nina Khrushcheva As the conflict in Ukraine grinds on for a fifth year, a new generation of Ukrainian politicians and activists are reckoning with a complex past and an uncertain future. In this conversation, filmmaker Oleg Sentsov will discuss his five-year imprisonment by Russia for speaking out against the occupation of Crimea. In conversation with scholar Nina Khrushcheva,…
Find out more »Impeachment – From the Ukrainian Perspective
Join us for the second meeting of the 2019-2020 New York Russia Public Policy Seminar, a forum co-hosted by the Harriman Institute and New York University's Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia! As the United States enters the next phase of the impeachment process, join our panel of experts as they consider what this means for Ukraine, Ukraine's relations with Russia, and Russia and Ukraine's relations with the U.S. moving forward. PANELISTS Oxana Shevel Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University Olga…
Find out more »Writers and Censors in the Russian Empire: The Case of Ivan Goncharov
When Ivan Goncharov was finishing Oblomov in the late 1850s, he was officially employed at the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee. Goncharov’s career as a censor lasted for almost 10 years and earned him high ranks in the bureaucratic system of the Russian Empire and solid wages, but had a negative effect on his literary reputation. Several of Goncharov’s contemporaries considered it immoral or inappropriate for a writer to become a censor. Still, Goncharov accepted his dubious position, and not only…
Find out more »Trump’s Ukraine: the Actors and Networks that Made the Scandal Possible
For non-expert audiences, Ukraine appeared on the map largely with the leak of the telephone call between president D. Trump and president V. Zelensky. But in fact, a number of Ukrainian-American networks and actors that make headlines today because of the Trump-Ukraine scandal have been around for much longer, characterizing post-Soviet transnational developments of the past decades. Sophie Lambroschini, a researcher on contemporary Ukraine at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin will go behind the scenes to give an overview of "who's…
Find out more »Soviet Literature as World Literature: Conference
For the past decade or two, world literature has established itself as the dominant paradigm for studying the transnational circulation of literary models and texts. And yet Russian and Soviet literature seem decidedly missing from most of the world literature theoretization. The issue at stake here is not so much another blank spot on the geographical and historical map of world literature—there are plenty of these and it is uncharitable to hold any book or its author(s) responsible for failing…
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