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V.V. Andreev’s Velikorusskii Orchestra: National Identity and Music in Late Imperial Russia
Anya Shatilova writes about Vasily Andreev, “a self-taught balalaika player” who in 1888 organized the Society of Balalaika Devotees in order to “manifest the ‘Russian national idea’ in musical form.
Rethinking “The Archives” in the Aftermath of Russia’s War in Ukraine, Part II
Instead of giving funding for travel to archives in Russia, funding should be determined by the project itself. Scholars should be able to propose travel to a variety of places...
On Studying and Teaching Lesser-Known Russian Writers
At every meeting of “The Other 19v,” a reading group devoted to discussing less-studied nineteenth-century Russian writers, we find new insights into this century of literary experimentation and cultural transformation....
Minor Writers and the Major Leagues, Part II
Another reason to study minor writers is that they help us to understand historical eras. They are part of the thick description of a given time. For the major-centric among...
Minor Writers and the Major Leagues, Part I
Why bother reading the minor writers of nineteenth-century Russia? There seems to be such a surplus of major writers, why dig any deeper?
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata on Stage: Domestic Violence and the Economics of Pity, Part II
Pity is weird. We happily extend it to strong figures but we’re stingy with the weak, with actual “victims.”
Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata on Stage: Domestic Violence and the Economics of Pity, Part I
I pictured myself as the narrator in Tolstoy’s 1889 novella The Kreutzer Sonata. Like me, he feigns sleep to escape a talkative seatmate. Like me, he is failed by this...
Minds and Bodies in the World, or: Learning to Love Dostoevsky
I'm not one of those American Slavists who came to the study of Russian literature by way of Dostoevsky. For a long time, I wasn’t even particularly interested—I’m afraid that...
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...
Between the Provinces and the World
Here, I will first explain my personal understanding of the meaning of "the provinces" to Russian Studies, then expound on some aspects of the same concept within Chinese and Russian...
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...