Russell Valentino unravels mystery behind Woman in the Window


Russell Valentino. Image by Ilaria Parogni

On April 3, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Russell Valentino – professor and chair of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University – to speak about his latest monograph The Woman in the Window, published by Ohio University Press in October 2014. Valentino stated that the image of a woman in the window was ubiquitous in the books and films with which he has been working for many years. When writing about this trope, Valentino added, it is hard not to write about male fantasy.

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Andrei Zorin’s Sandglass



All creative works are autobiographical, but they are autobiographical in their own way.

As part of NYU’s commemoration of the War of 1812, the Jordan Center was pleased to welcome Andrei Zorin last Friday, to present an engaging talk on the problems of ruptures, ends, continuities and discontinuities in history and in Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. While he was mostly concerned with the subject of time in the novel, Zorin also made a case for reading the novel as a personal experience for Tolstoy rather than as a national epic.

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