Featured
Irina Sandomirskaja discusses cultural significance of Russian icon in Soviet context
On March 13, 2015, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Irina Sandomirskaja, Professor of Cultural Studies at Södertörn University, to present a paper entitled “Originating...
Professor Natalia Levina Speaks on Ukraine at an NYU Community Discussion
If you are wondering what you can do to help them, I am sure the people of Ukraine appreciate all the donations coming their way. Thank you from the bottom...
One Year Ago: Professor Natalia Levina Speaks on Ukraine at NYU
I grew up in Kharkiv. Countless memories are tied to the main city square, which has now been bombed. Almost a year ago, I learned that my own childhood home...
Lycanthropy in Russia: Victor Pelevin’s “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia” as Metaphor of Transformation
Pelevin’s werewolf tale uses the metaphor of a human-beast hybrid to describe a place beyond the strict binaries of (post-)socialism.
Candid about the Camera: Tolstoy Scholars on Adapting Anna Karenina
Tolstoy can be so unforgiving with his ladies.
Wright's Wrongs: Filming and Failing Anna Karenina
They couldn't have reproduced all of Tolstoy's intricate balance, but they could certainly have tried harder.
Open Letter on the Termination of Russian Studies Faculty at Ohio University
Like you, we are wholeheartedly invested in the survival and recovery of higher education in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic. That recovery depends on the will of universities...
Marital Happy Endings and Cultural Politics in a Contemporary Australian Adaptation of Anna Karenina
In our time, there is a definite expectation that people know what they want and ensure their own happiness.
Teymur Ateşli: A Traitor-Hero for the Cold-War Era
For an ethnically Turkish man from the Soviet Union, fighting with the Nazis was no betrayal.
Selling the Cherry Orchard (Russia's Alien Nations)
On the battleground of market capitalism, the sovok is a metaphysical conscientious objector.
Love (Not Death): A Postmodern Tolstoy in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina
Despite flaws of both execution and interpretation, this most recent adaptation displays a genuinely intelligent understanding Tolstoy’s novel.
Russell Valentino unravels mystery behind Woman in the Window
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...
Why Talk About Regional Leadership in a Time of War?
Will a major power always hurt smaller nations simply because it can and wants to, ignoring all rules and obligations? Or will the major power build a more complex relationship with smaller nations that are ultimately beneficial to both sides?
Ideas That Plague Us: Reading “Crime and Punishment” as a Pandemic Narrative, Part I
The motif of illness runs through Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and accompanies key developments and themes—so much so that the novel can be read as a pandemic or plague narrative.
Ideas That Plague Us: Reading “Crime and Punishment” as a Pandemic Narrative, Part II
It is ironic that Raskolnikov justifies selecting the old woman as his victim because she is economically unproductive and sick. Raskolnikov is himself perpetually ill, does not work, and relies on charity from the women in his life.
Off the Reservation (Russia's Alien Nations)
The “Orc question” becomes much more provocative when seen in terms of internal cultural dynamics.
3 Questions: Russian intellectual history as a practice and project (Historia Nova Interviews)
What kinds of intellectual projects would be most beneficial for our shared fields?
Rewriting Russian History Through Cinematic Representations of Revolutionary Terrorism
Russian revolutionary terrorism is a perennial subject for state-sanctioned historical reconstruction, receiving a wide variety of treatments in cinema from the early Soviet period to the present day.
Plight of the Living Dead: An Update on the Cinematic Saga of “Empire V”
Like its vampiric subjects, the beleaguered film adaptation of Victor Pelevin’s novel "Empire V" can perhaps best be described as neither fully dead nor fully alive. A year after the...
Summer Reading Series: Mikhail Zoshchenko's "Sentimental Tales," Part IV
The author pledges to his dear readers that when he recalls certain sentimental scenes—say, the heroine crying over a portrait, or the same heroine mending Apollo Perepenchuk’s torn tunic, or,...