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Review: Olga Zilberbourg's English-Language Debut, "Like Water and Other Stories"
In both content and form, Zilberbourg’s "Like Water" expands the boundaries of Russian-American fiction, showing new ways of writing immigrant lives.
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...
Women’s Gymnastics and the Cold War: How Soviet Smiles Won Over the West
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union produced a true world star: Olga Korbut, a young gymnast from Belarus who gained fame as the first smiling Soviet athlete.
Russian Consumer Smackdown: Television vs. the Fridge
The inevitable refrain “We have seen worse!” implied that there was nothing about the current recession that Russian citizens hadn’t competently handled before.
Catherine the Little and Crimean Puppets: From Vandalism to Voodoo in Ukrainian Popular Culture, Part II
Whereas vandalism is programmatically collective and anonymous, voodoo performance requires a priest: an authorial actor and director of the ritual.
ShUV, Death and the 1990s in Russian Comics
Olga Lavrenteva's ShUV blazes a trail for graphic narrative in Russia even as it looks back at a traumatic period of recent Russian history — an ambitious set of aims...
In Russian Cultural Policy, the Customer is Always Wrong
Olga Lyubimova’s appointment as Russia’s new minister of culture in early 2020 was an immediate scandal. In old LiveJournal posts that surfaced on social media, she boldly declared an aversion...
Mali 2023: How Russia Made Its Way into Malian Life
Evgeny Prigozhin is dead, but Wagner’s mercenaries remain in Mali, and give no sign of leaving any time soon.
Insurgents Built In: How Wars Radicalized the Most Integrated Muslims in the Russian Empire
With observers consistently pointing to the social isolation and lack of opportunity Muslim youth often confront, why are European societies reluctant to listen to Muslim citizens who — speaking a...
Reconstructing Stalingrad: The Struggle to Rebuild and Redefine the "Hero City" After 1943, Part III
Despite the campaign to rename the city from Stalingrad to Volgograd, and the attendant scrubbing of the leader’s image and name from public space, Stalinist culture was already ingrained in...
Russians’ “Impressionable Years”
I argue that Russians’ worldview in the Putin era derives, at least in part, from the lived experience of the years just before and after the Soviet Union’s collapse. The...
Time Out of Joint (Unstuck in Time)
The manipulation of Russian historical precedent for present-day political gain is rather clear-cut
"Everyone Reads the Text That's in Their Own Head": An Interview with Linor Goralik
I’ve really lucked out in that I really consider myself to be a private individual, I don’t feel the need to look for a relationship to the Russian literary canon,...
Polina Barskova surveys poetries from the Siege of Leningrad
The Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944) produced "multiple poetries," some published within hours, some written "in the dark," never to be published.
Ode to the Hybrid: Writing as a Russian-American
On October 16, 2020, the Jordan Center hosted Olga Livshin, an English-language poet of Jewish descent, via Russia and Ukraine. Livshin began by introducing and reading excerpts from her recently...
The New Russian and the American Psycho (Russia's Alien Nations)
The New Russians of Death Comes by Internet would make excellent cult leaders
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...
Together, Russia and America Make the Worst Film of the Century
Branded, the recent film written and directed by Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerain, is a shining example for the much-ballyhooed "reset" of Russian-American relations. Bradshaw and Duleriin have proven that...
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...
Dispatch from Moscow: Observing the World Cup
Just steps from the Mausoleum, fans could participate in a mock World Cup soccer match, buy refreshments, or try their luck kicking a ball against the "highly skilled" Robokeeper —...