19v is an informal collective dedicated to the literature, art, and culture of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. Our group began in spring of 2020 motivated by the question, what does nineteenth-century culture mean for us today? Our main goal was and remains to foster intellectual community for all who share an interest in this period. We aim to provide a meeting place for scholars from around the world and at all career stages. Hosted by NYU’s Jordan Center, the 19v Seminar Series meets over Zoom approximately once monthly to share and discuss our work. All are welcome to attend and contribute.
Although 19v was launched before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we began our collaboration with an awareness of the intellectual problems posed by empire and imperialism. Today more than ever we are committed to asking how what we call “Russian” literature and art are embedded in ongoing histories of empire and colonization: what does it mean to try to “decolonize” Russian studies at a time when Russia is waging a war of aggression against its neighbor and questioning its right to an independent existence?
Organizing committee:
Sara Dickinson, Università di Genova, Dipartimento di Lingue e Culture Moderne
Ilya Kliger, New York University
Anne Lounsbery, New York University
Margaret Samu, Parsons School of Design/The New School
To join 19v please add your name and information to this document.
We encourage participants to form their own subgroups and initiatives. Please feel free to look through the google doc linked below to learn about participants’ interests and get in touch with one another. Would you like to propose a lecture or discussion, start a reading group, contribute to the blog? All proposals, posts, presentations, discussions, etc. may be in either Russian or English.
Current initiatives:
19v Seminar Series
Contact Sara Dickinson, Anne Lounsbery, or Margaret Samu. See our YouTube channel with past events.
Art History Seminar
Contact Margaret Samu and Nikita Balagurov at 19varthistoryseminar@gmail.com and see our Facebook group.
The Other 19v: Reading Group for Minor Russian Writers
Contact Yulia Dubasova (dubasova@usc.edu), Anastassia Kostrioukova (anastassia.kos@gmail.com), or Hana Stankova (hana.stankova@yale.edu)
For an idea of what motivated the founding of 19v in 2020, we reproduce here part of the original announcement:
The brilliant cultural production of the nineteenth-century Russian Empire has long drawn students and scholars to the Russian field. But as this period grows more distant (is the nineteenth century the new eighteenth century?), we encounter both framing challenges and intellectual opportunities. What does nineteenth-century culture mean for us today?
Centuries are imaginary entities that we use to manage the flux of time. For historians of Russia and Europe, until 1989/91, the nineteenth century served as “the origin story of the present” (as noted in the description of the 2019 ASEEES roundtable “What Was—and When Was—Russia’s 19th Century?”). But in recent years the era’s relationship to our own time has become less obvious. New scholarship in European and world history has taken advantage of this distance to ask large synthesizing questions (as we see in books like Jürgen Osterhammel’s Transformation of the World). Historians of Russia are beginning to explore similar topics, reflecting on the period’s boundaries and overall significance.
We believe that our approaches to nineteenth-century Russian culture could benefit from such reflection. Particularly in Western scholarship on Russia, we have tended to organize our inquiries around certain familiar categories, foremost among them the author function. While we recognize the fundamental importance of such categories, we also welcome opportunities to focus on others. To that end, listed below are examples of questions that might inform our work.
How is what we call “Russian” culture embedded in ongoing histories of empire, colonization, exclusion, extraction, etc., and how are our own ways of reading and seeing affected by these histories? What might it mean to “decolonize” Russian studies, and in what ways is such a metaphor—developed, of course, in very different contexts—suitable to our field? How might Russianists learn from Western conversations about race and ethnicity, and how might the Russian case add nuance to these conversations?
Periodization issues: is there a long (or a short?) nineteenth century in literary and artistic culture? What are the texts, images, dates and events that typically serve as dividing lines, and to what extent are they the same or different across sub-fields and approaches? For instance, how can we most productively conceive of the relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian culture? Should we be trying to bring together the study of the pre- and post-Reform periods? Does the literary nineteenth century end in 1917?
When is it most useful to focus on Russian cultural production’s place in larger European and world systems, and when is it important to insist on its particularity?
What does “realism” signify in the Russian context? What about “World Literature”?
How are we to understand the relationship between literary and artistic culture and the Imperial state? For example, what is the significance of the fact that many writers (like Sollogub, Goncharov, Melnikov, Shchedrin, Leskov) were in government service at one time or another, and that virtually all professional artists were state employees, dependent on state institutions for their training and employment and on government commissions for their livelihood? How did the particular nature of the state-society relationship in Russia shape not just writers’ and artists’ lives, but the literary and artistic forms they produced?
How can we bring together Russian and non-Russian scholars so that “native” and “non-native” approaches can learn from each other? Are Western academics sufficiently aware of Russian and Soviet scholarship? How are Western approaches to Russian literature and art received in Russia today?
How do we deal with “minorness” in an era of very major writers and artists?
What constitutes the canon of nineteenth-century women writers and how do we make these voices heard? How can we integrate questions of gender into our teaching of both women’s and men’s texts, especially given that the Woman Question animates so much intellectual and artistic discourse of the period? How does the position of women writers in Russia compare to that of women writers elsewhere, and what can the Russian tradition contribute to feminist theoretical approaches generally?
How can we incorporate non-textual media (visual, musical, performative, material) into our work, and how might such materials reorient—or productively destabilize—the literary canon?
Are we paying sufficient attention to the transnational networks—particularly Slavic/East European/Eurasian—that helped animate Russian art and thought in the nineteenth century?
Should we focus more on integrating the study of poetry and prose? Prose and drama?
How can we interest undergraduate and graduate students in nineteenth-century culture at a time when the present moment’s concerns are more urgent than ever? In other words—and this speaks to far larger questions in the academy—how can we work to counter the presentism that threatens to distort our understanding of art and its place in the world?
Of course we don’t expect that everyone’s work will directly address the issues we’ve listed. Rather, it’s our hope that keeping an eye on such questions will help us take advantage of a transitional moment in the study of Russian culture.
Anne Lounsbery, New York University
Sara Dickinson, Università di Genova, Dipartimento di Lingue e Culture Moderne
Margaret Samu, Parsons School of Design/The New School