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Daniel Mellis and Eugene Ostashevsky recreate Vasily Kamensky’s Tango with Cows
On October 30, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed visual artist Daniel Mellis and Russian-American poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky to speak on their...
The Rise and Fall of a Stalinist Russian Orthodox Monk
The rise and fall of the priest-monk Father Sergii (Nikolai Vasil’evich Romanov), who was sentenced in November 2021 to 42 months imprisonment for vigilantism and other crimes, illustrates Russia’s struggle...
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...
Necrorealism: Turning Bare Life into Art (Part II)
Necrorealism's mediation does to life what photography does to the sign; like milk, it turns, but in it there is also a process of homogenization or a general equivalence that...
On Translating the chinari
While their participation in OBERIU offered a crucial period of incubation for their thought and art, it is as chinari that Kharms, Vvedensky, Lipavsky, and Druskin assumed their most influential...
A Spectre is Haunting Russia, or A Chilling Journey from Ulyanovsk to Silicon Valley, Part I
How does the Airpod-sporting, Tesla-obsessed Ulyanovsk teen compare to Eugene Onegin with a bust of Napoleon in his study?
“The Russian Avant-Garde Goes Underground”
On Saturday, April 20, the Poets House hosted a panel discussion on the Russian Avant-Garde, co-sponsored by the Jordan Center. The panel consisted of Anthony Anemone, Polina Barskova, Ainsley Morse,...
Kvas Patriotism in Russia: Cultural Problems, Cultural Myths
Professor Brintlinger's argument is developed along three ideas: Russian ideas about food become heightened during times of war and conflict; specific foods embody meaning beyond their sustenance value, to include...
Anna Karenina, Runway Diva, or, Vengeance is mine, saith The Gap
All fashionistas are alike; all fashion victims are victims in their own way.
Sex secrets of the Russian classics
Reason #137 to study Russian literature: apparently, it will teach children about sex. This is a good thing, because no one else in Russia seems to want to.
Teaching Race in Russia Part II: From Harlem to the “Soviet South”
My students, like Vladimir Nabokov before them, were surprised at how sexualized American racism was and how often black men were lynched for charges of even looking at white women.
Gothic Doubling and The Double, Gothically
Dostoevsky was well aware of the power of the gothic.
The Snowball Effect: An Immigrant Story
When I tell my story of immigration, which story do I tell?
Matt Taibbi's Not-So-Secret Russian Past
Like the clueless expats they loathed, the editors treated Moscow and its residents as their playground.
Necrorealism: Turning Bare Life into Art (Part I)
The peculiar style of life, art, and action practiced by the necrorealists in their early appearances was part of a larger tradition in late Soviet culture that exhibited a mode...
Cooking the Raw Youth (Akunin WQ 11)
This is less “The Queen of Spades” and more “Scooby Doo Meets Batman.”
Bitter Taste: How Gorky Saved Pushkin’s Honor by Closing His Café, Part III
Immediately after Gorky's death, rumors began to spread that he had been poisoned by chocolate candies sent to him from the Kremlin. Whether this is true or not, nobody knows....
Utopia Interrupted
When I was designing "Utopia Interrupted," my main goal was to foreground the diversity of voices and forms of difference of Soviet and post-Soviet literature and culture that is often...
Excerpt from Emil Draitser's "In the Jaws of the Crocodile: A Soviet Memoir," Part IV
On the eve of my emigration, I was convinced I should say farewell to my writing life once and for all. I was sure that leaving the country where my...
Guns for Lenin: A New Jersey Love Story
A family stands in a field. The woman has flowers in her hair and a revolver in her hand. The man stands proudly with a rifle beside him, while their...