Featured
Candid about the Camera: Tolstoy Scholars on Adapting Anna Karenina
Tolstoy can be so unforgiving with his ladies.
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.
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.
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.
Anna Karenina, Runway Diva, or, Vengeance is mine, saith The Gap
All fashionistas are alike; all fashion victims are victims in their own way.
Vladimir Putin and the Great Patriotic War in the “Russia — My History” Museum
During Putin’s “restoration of patriotism,” separating out those who question the heroism of the Great Patriotic War has become an essential aspect of defining who truly belongs to the national...
Tolstoy's Double, Part I
When Tolstoy wrote fiction he became alive to himself, conscious and capable of accessing otherwise obscure depths and fields of thought and feeling. Writing Anna Karenina continually unsettled him.
Tolstoy's Double, Part II
Tolstoy was sensitive and impressionable, but if a war, a guillotining, an autopsy or a famine was happening nearby, he wanted to see it for himself.
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...
Governing Religion, Mobilizing Faith: Conference Recap
The Jordan Center's first all-day conference of the fall on Friday October 18th: "Governing Religion, Mobilizing Faith"
Tolstoy’s Orphans
On November 4th, 2021, the Jordan Center hosted Professor David Herman for a talk “Tolstoy’s Orphans.” Professor Herman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and...
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.
What Russians Think When They Hear the Word "Nazi"
Claiming that a country whose head of state is a Jew with relatives who died in the Holocaust is a “neo-Nazi” state is absurd. Yet for many Russians, this claim...
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.
Maria Galmarini-Kabala on “defective children” and the state that treated them
Historian Maria Galmarini-Kabala puts her lens on a 1920s children’s sanatorium in search of “norms, discourses and historiographical frames” of the period’s pedagogy.
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.
Re-Introducing Fandorin (Turkish Gambit 2)
he Turkish Gambit appears to be as much an ironic sequel to Anna Karenina as it is the literal sequel to The Winter Queen.
Tolstoy the Peasant: A "Myth" Revisited
To what extent was the "myth" of Leo Tolstoy-as-peasant purveyed by Ilya Repin merely that—a myth? Was it, in fact, not a myth at all? Tolstoy was no peasant, for...
Energy Aesthetics: Force, Flow, and En-tropy in Russian Culture
Literature, visual arts, popular science brought together Russian scholars in fields ranging from visual arts to literature to anthropology. The aim of the interdisciplinary symposium was to examine “energy as...
On Not Talking about Gender in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature
As a graduate student in Russian literature, I wrote a dissertation and eventually a book about the body and the grotesque in nineteenth-century realism. As I look back, I can’t...