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Margaret Samu on the reception of the female nude in Imperial Russia
What does the reception of the female nude tell us about Westernization, art criticism and taste in Imperial Russia?
How Higher Education Keeps Dictators in Power
For authoritarian regimes, however, investing in universities also poses a risk. Cultivating a robust system of higher education may facilitate the development of a middle class and politically active youth...
Art in the Middle
When I started working on nineteenth-century Russian art almost two decades ago, one of the things that surprised me most was the stark division between the two halves of the...
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...
Shaving Eisenstein in Manhattan
An old-fashioned shave, with a razor that in Russian they call “dangerous”; an uncannily private scene performed under an open sky, 800 feet over the sidewalks of the greatest city...
Russia vs. PornHub: Lie Back and Think of the Motherland
Apparently, people would rather do anything else—watch porn, have gay sex—than engage in heterosexual intercourse.
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.
The New Russian in the Rearview Mirror (Russia's Alien Nations)
What could be more Nineties than that?
Announcing: Working Group on 19th-century Russian Culture and Literature
Dostoevsky + 11 time zones: it’s why Russian studies is never going away. Or at least that’s what I was taught in graduate school—and indeed the brilliant cultural production of...
Scheduling Conflicts (Unstuck in Time)
On or about December 1991, the normal course of time in Russia stopped.
Mark Galeotti discusses trajectories in Putin’s Russia
On Sept. 29 the NYU School of Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs and the Jordan Center teamed up to present the first installment of Revisiting Russia, a special series...
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...
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...
The Orc-Song of Mikhail Y. Elizarov (Russia's Alien Nations)
The song is an implicit call for the renewal of Orc pride.