Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

Join us for another 19v seminar! Edited by Marina Bykova, Michael Forster, and Lina Steiner, the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought provides an in-depth survey of major figures, currents, and developments in Russian and Soviet intellectual history. It brings together a wide range of leading scholars from Europe, Russia, and North America to reveal the richness and unique interdisciplinary character of Russian thought. This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.   

This talk will explore how Buddhism came to exist in the Russian Empire by examining the three peoples who are commonly cited as Russia’s traditional practitioners of the religion: the Kalmyks, Buryats, and Tuvans. It will provide comparisons in regards to how the Kalmyks, Buryats, and Tuvans adopted Buddhism, as well as explore the primary sources available that tell these stories. In doing so, it will also focus on the political role of Buddhism in society and demonstrate how in…

Orphanhood is a key to Tolstoy's fiction – almost invisible yet obsessively present and at the core of his thinking.  Though his best known protagonists are all grown orphans, people raised without maternal warmth, the question is always broached and quickly dropped.  This strange pattern seems at first probably incidental, at most a narrative-opening convenience for a writer both of whose parents had died by the time he was 9.  But if read carefully, the pre-crisis fiction – Childhood, The Cossacks,…

The intensification of ecological fragility and rapidity of environmental change in the Siberian Arctic questions adaptability and human capacity to predict and avert ecological disasters while pointing at potential limitations of available models for forecasting and mitigating environmental calamities. Given the bounded human capacity for predicting unpredictable, the challenge is to craft a tentative strategy that takes into detailed and balanced consideration limitations and productive potential of knowledge whether scientific or public. This talk will examine the potentials of co-mobilising…

Join us for another 19v seminar! Focusing on the decades-long persecution of Colonel A. P. Dubovitskii for his supposed ties to mystic Ekaterina Tatarinova, this paper traces the sources of the investigation to a fundamental divide in Church and state between Petersburg Metropolitan Serafim (Glagolevsky), Alexander I, and the generation that fought the Napoleonic wars, on the one hand, and a new generation that comes to power with Nicholas I and Moscow Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov), who use the aftermath of the…

As the post-Trump pandemic moment registers waves of intertwining political, social, economic and environmental crisis, it also echoes the long durée collapse of the Soviet empire. This talk attends to the ways in which the fall of the Soviet empire from the 1980s to the early 1990s rendered legible an imperial politics of difference and, in turn, the rise of ethno-nationalism in the region (and beyond). Art produced amidst the collapse shaped new forms of politics, in particular conceptions of…