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Levada Center Attacked for Doing Research with American Scholars
Social science will suffer as a result.
Televising Soviet Ballet in the Twenty-First Century
On a day when the news was silent about why the stock market had failed to open, and as protests were unfolding in major cities across Russia, watching ballet on...
Locked Rooms (Murder of the Leviathan Part I)
If the Leviathan were the Titanic, all of the characters would easily find their way to a lifeboat, caring not a whit whether or not Kate Winslet’s heart will go...
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...
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.
Ships That Crash in the Night (Murder on the Leviathan, Conclusion)
Part III blows the whole thing up.
Loving the Leviathan (Russia's Alien Nations)
The State is the Leviathan; the New Russian is somewhere between a piranha and a guppy.
Babel and Black Bodies on the High Seas (Murder on the Leviathan Part II)
Akunin scatters living and dead black bodies at the scenes of avarice-driven crimes and follies.
The Leviathan and the Gutter: Gefter.ru interviews NYU's Mikhail Iampolski (Part I)
There’s no law, Putin is absolutely impotent, he can’t do anything. That’s it. All that’s left is to sit there, like a medieval serf, and hope to God that you...
The Leviathan and the Gutter: Gefter.ru interviews NYU's Mikhail Iampolski (Part II)
It’s all very sad, I think. The capacity for thought has already disappeared, and now dignity is gradually being snuffed out, but I don’t see any solutions. People still depend...
Fall Reading Series: Sergei Gandlevsky's "Illegible," Part II
Sergey Gandlevsky has written that his very first childhood poem, written on the occasion of the transfer to another school of the “beautiful, stern” little girl he had a crush...
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...
Fall Reading Series: Sergei Gandlevsky's "Illegible," Part I
In contemporary Russian literary life, Gandlevsky’s stature as a poet is indisputably great; he is less well known as a prose writer, although his novels and essays have been critically...
Fall Reading Series: Sergei Gandlevsky's "Illegible," Part III
Krivorotov tried to cause a jealous scene, but Anya would have none of it. “I have one jailer, my aunt, and that’s enough,” the young woman said to him. “If...
Zvyagintsev’s "Leviathan" and Debates on Authority, Agency and Authenticity
We argue that the film effectively generated political debates because it left viewers to grapple with a series of ambiguous positions, which merit attention at a moment when most observers...
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...
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.
Legal Nihilism in Russian Television Crime Dramas
The representation of law and justice in Russian crime dramas — and especially their inability to offer a positive image of universally applied law of the Western type — vividly...
Anticommunism, Neoliberalism, and the Rerunning of Socialist Era Films on Romanian Television
Anticommunist discourse has long since ceased to advance the democratization of society by means of depoliticization and “decommunization.” Instead, it has become a discourse that protects the privileges of the...