Featured
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...
Spring Reading Series: Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Beyond Tula," Part I
"Beyond Tula" has a transparently insignificant plot: a young writer from the city comes to visit his engineer friend in the country for a couple of days, and everything ends...
Spring Reading Series: Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Beyond Tula," Part II
Railroad engineers used to refer to tracks in the feminine: “get up on her,” they’d say about the fifth track, or “she’s a tough one, the eleventh.”
Spring Reading Series: Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Beyond Tula," Part III
Darya Fyodorovna came in and asked whether to serve them dinner, but the co-op operator was loping dreamily around the room. A porcelain Easter egg was hanging in the corner...
Red Goes Green: A Contemporary Ecological Reading of a Soviet Classic
“Pkhents,” written by Abram Tertz, the pen name of Andrei Sinyavsky, is the story of an incognito extraterrestrial stranded in the Soviet Union. He’s not one of the stereotypical little...
Heroes and Zeros: Ded Moroz and Yuri Olesha
Who's your hero: Yuri Olesha, Ded Moroz, or Tyler Durden?
New Men in Love (Russia's Alien Nations)
The "New People suffer from a socialist version of the “terrible perfection” Barbara Heldt identified as the defining flaw of nineteenth-century Russian heroines
A Hothouse Flower in a Communal Apartment (Russia's Alien Nations)
Sinyavsky exploits the alien metaphor to the fullest by making his narrator an exotic plant that can barely survive in the harsh Moscow winter and the harsher Soviet communal apartment.
Aristocrats from Outer Space (Russia's Alien Nations)
An Ayn Rand hero from outer space
Narratives of Childbirth in Tolstoy’s "War and Peace"
I started to wonder if the very fact that there is not much to Liza’s birth scene might precisely be the point. Because, while a birth scene can be understood...
Cold Snap (Part I): Russian Film after Leviathan
This essay provides context for roughly thirty-five current and upcoming Russian films, loosely clustered around four topics: directors; debuts; economic health; and dominant industry trends.
The Man Who Has Everything (Russia's Alien Nations)
These novels include: transparent alien artifact hunters, a lost tribe of yeti, and a cryogenically frozen Adolf Hitler maintained by a colony of cloned Valkyries on a secret Antarctic base
Cold Snap (Part II): Russian Film after Leviathan
An auteurist orientation, therefore, is neither good nor bad, but it is certainly mismatched to an industry—especially during periods of robust growth—in which so-called “spectators’ cinema” [zritel'skoe kino] is in...
Ales Bialiatski: A Moral Choice We Hope Never to Face
Ales Bialiatski’s was one of the strangest Nobel lectures in history. Not only did the laureate not write it himself, he did not deliver it—at the time of the ceremony,...
Workers Against the Workers’ State, Part II
"Dear Comrades!" won a special jury prize at the Venice film festival in September 2020. A one-hour promotional video follows Konchalovsky and Vysotskaya as they cavort through luxury locations in...
Vanishing Act: Evasive Storytelling in Platonov’s “The Lunar Bomb” (1926)
Andrei Platonov's fictional works are difficult to categorize squarely within one genre. While his later works adhere more closely to realism, his works from the 1920s range from science fiction...
“C’mon, Turn Swan Lake on!”: The Belarusian Protests of 2020 and Memories of the 1990s
In the 2020 Belarusian demonstrations, references to perestroika and the 1990s abounded. In our recently published article, we showed that recalling the civic activism of 1989-1991 allowed a symbolic return to recent political upheavals in the sense of “picking up where we left off.”
Our Pushkin?
Pushkinists know that today is a holiday. The first graduating class of the Tsarkoe Selo Lyceum annually celebrated the anniversary of their first day of school by gathering, drinking, and...
War and Pestilence: The Epidemiological Motif in L. N. Tolstoy's Historical Epic
In the motivic structure of "War and Peace," the “mythical” French "grippe" of Anna Petrovna Scherer occupies a unique position. It is a simultaneously socio-linguistic, satirical, historical, moral, and providential...
Workers Against the Workers’ State, Part I
The artistic qualities of "Dear Comrades!", along with its superficial willingness to confront a tragic chapter of Russian history, have attracted glowing reviews from some Western critics and may win...