Jordan Center for the
Advanced Study of Russia

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…

The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin’s regime while Limonov and his groups became part of the liberal opposition. To illuminate the role of these right-wing ideas in contemporary Russian society, Fabrizio Fenghi examines…

Join us for another 19v seminar! In this lecture, Professor Ani Kokobobo traces a new minority masculinity in Tolstoy's late narratives after the author denounces sexuality in works like The Kreutzer Sonata. If typical Tolstoyan "seeker" characters, like Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, and Konstantin Levin were always social misfits who did not fit within societal roles and sought a sphere outside of society for their own mental growth and development, a number of Tolstoy’s later characters take matters further and…

Though most scholarship on Pushkin’s reception in the United States focuses on twentieth-century African American literature, the origins of this encounter remain poorly understood. In fact, nineteenth-century commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were obsessed with Pushkin’s racial heritage—as both a Russian, and as a canonical European writer of African descent. This collaborative talk (prepared by a transatlantic historian of race and a Slavist) brings together little-remembered newspaper records, personal correspondence, and others texts—from the mid-1830s onwards—to recover how…

Olga Livshin is an English-language poet of Jewish descent, via Russia and Ukraine. The Los Angeles Review of Books described her 2019 book as follows: "In her inventive collection of 'poems with translations,' A Life Replaced, ... Livshin writes in conversation with Akhmatova, using the older poet’s grief as a guide to navigate the depressing present." In conversation with Eliot Borenstein, Livshin will discuss the challenges of finding the right words for transnational ties to her home countries after the 2016 election as a…

At a time when nearly everyone else was writing about nature as something to be conquered, Eisenstein was joining personal experience with Romantic and Indigenous tropes to write about self-immersion in nature as a a source of individual liberation, a model for understanding film reception, and a blueprint for a utopian socialist collective. This presentation will examine his 1945 essay, “The Music of Landscape,” to show how immersion in nature offered Eisenstein new avenues for further developing his ideas about…

Utility (pol’za) was a watchword of Empress Elizabeth’s reign (1741-61). The 1745 Atlas of the Russian Empire, published in nineteen regional maps and a general map of the empire, was presented in this spirit. The atlas united “geographical rules” and “new observations” to create a complete picture of the All-Russian Empire and contiguous lands. The visual and the imperial intersect in two important ways in the crafting of the Atlas. First, scientific visualization by specialists trained in geography and astronomy,…

Between the Soviet Union’s outreach to countries like Egypt and Afghanistan in the mid-1950s and the growing role of Communists in Iraq following that country’s 1958 revolution, Muslim intellectuals and ulema feared the expansion of Communism in the Middle East. They began to conceive of Islam as a distinct ideological system and alternative to capitalism and socialism, and they looked to other post-colonial countries for models of how they could organize political organizations to rival Communist parties. Taking advantage of…

In late imperial Russia, rising demand for energy and widespread concerns about the depletion of forests caused an interest in peat as an industrial fuel. In the booming industrial districts of the Vladimir and Moscow provinces in particular, factory owners adopted peat fuel to fire furnaces and operate engines, while railroad operators made experiments to move trains with the help of peat. Their efforts were encouraged by the imperial state which, itself an owner of substantial peatbogs, provided the personal…