Past Events

2019

"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else", a talk by Ronald Suny

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Ronald Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago, and Senior Researcher at the National Research University -- Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, Russia. 

He is the author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918:  Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972); Armenia in the Twentieth Century (Scholars Press, 1983); The Making of the Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1994); Looking Toward Ararat:  Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press, 1993); The Revenge of the Past:  Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 1993); The Soviet Experiment:  Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford University Press, 1998, 2011); and “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else:”  A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015).    

Sponsored by the Amherst College Lecture Committee, Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund, and Lamont Lecture Fund.

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"The Laws of  Land Warfare at the 1899 Hague Conference: A European Story", a talk by Peter Holquist

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Peter Holquist is Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History: Graduate Studies Chair at the University of Pennsylvania. 

"Remizov's Dreamworld", Exhibition Reception

Monday, August 12, 2019

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"Paste, Stick, Glue: Constructing Collage in Russia", a Scholars Roundtable
Thursday, April 25, 2019

With Ilya Kukulin (NRU Higher School of Economics), Jane Sharp (Rutgers University), and Tomáš Glanc (University of Zurich)

The roundtable is moderated by Galina Mardilovich, Acting Curator of Russian and European Art at the Mead Art Museum and Curator of the current exhibition. 

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"Soviet Cybernetics and the Cybernetic Art of Lev Nussberg and the Dvizhenie Group", a talk by Tomas Glanc (University of Zurich)
Wednesday, April 24, 2019

A Talk by Tomas Glanc: "Soviet Cybernetics and the Cybernetic Art of Lev Nussberg and the Dvizhenie Group". 

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"Configurations of Russian-Jewish Modernity", the Symposium in Russian-Jewish History: Exhibition of the Russian-Jewish Journals
Thursday, April 18, 2019

A Talk by Marina Mogilner: “[De]racializing Modern Jewishness between the “Boasian Revolution” in the US and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia”

A Talk by Brian Horowitz: “Jabotinsky's Russia and the Politics and Culture of Pre-State Zionism”

"This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia", a book talk by Joan Neuberger
Thursday, April 11, 2019

Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, was no ordinary movie. Commissioned by Joseph Stalin in 1941 to justify state terror in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth, the film's politics, style, and epic scope aroused controversy even before it was released. In This Thing of Darkness, Joan Neuberger offers a sweeping account of the conception, making and reception of Ivan the Terrible that weaves together Eisenstein's expansive thinking and experimental practice with a groundbreaking new view of artistic production under Stalin. Drawing on Eisenstein's unpublished production notebooks, diaries and manuscripts, Neuberger's riveting narrative chronicles Eisenstein's personal, creative and political challenges and reveals the ways cinematic invention, artistic theory, political critique and historical and psychological analysis went hand in hand in this famously complex film. Ivan the Terrible, she argues, shows us one of the world's greatest filmmakers and one of the 20th century's greatest artists observing the world around him and experimenting with every element of film art to explore the psychology of political ambition, uncover the history of recurring cycles of violence and lay bare the tragedy of absolute power.

Joan Neuberger's new book, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia, was published by Cornell University Press, in March 2019. Prof. Neuberger studies modern Russian culture in the social and political context, with a focus on the politics of the arts. She is the author of an eclectic range of publications, including Hooliganism: Crime and Culture in St Petersburg, 1900-1914 (California: 1993), Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (Palgrave: 2003); co-author of Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815-1914 (Oxford: 2005); and co-editor of Imitations of Life: Melodrama in Russia (Duke: 2001) and Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture(Yale: 2008); Everyday Life in Russian History: Quotidian Studies in Honor of Daniel Kaiser (Slavica, 2010); and The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein in Honor of Naum Kleiman (Mimésis International. 2017). 

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"Protest Songs in Putin's Russia", a talk by Artemy Troitsky
Thursday, March 21, 2019

After a decade of relative economic prosperity and political laziness, the 2010s became the decade of the growing conflict between Putin's authoritarian regime and the young people of Russia, demanding freedom and social justice. Among them there are rockers and rappers, using the Internet and live gigs to express their anger. The report will be illustrated by music and videos.
Artemy Troitsky is a journalist, music critic, promoter and broadcaster who played a vital role in popularizing independent Soviet rock music, as well as establishing the post-Soviet musical culture. He has published a large number of works about the Soviet underground that have been published in Great Britain, the United States, Europe, and Japan. Currently, Troitsky resides in Estonia, primarily involved with social journalism, but continuing to host radio-projects “Pesni i Plyaski” (Song and Dance) and “Zapiski iz Podpolya” (Notes from the Underground).

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"Paste, Stick, Glue: Constructing Collage in Russia", Opening Reception
Monday, March 4, 2019

The word collage comes from the French verb coller, which means “to paste, stick, glue.” In practice, it is a technique that involves the physical layering of disparate elements. It originated as an art form when the Cubists and Futurists experimented with the surface of the picture plane in the early 1910s. Yet collage’s capacity for combining, fragmenting, and disrupting meaning has since rendered it an inexhaustible medium, emblematic of the fast-paced modern world.

Paste, Stick, Glue: Constructing Collage in Russia offers a historical overview of the many ways in which Russian and Soviet artists employed collage and the related techniques of film montage and photomontage. Drawn from the permanent collections of the Mead Art Museum and Amherst Center for Russian Culture, the exhibition features works by Liubov’ Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Sergei Eisenstein, Oscar Rabin, Oleg Kudryashov, and Alexander Kosolapov among others.

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"1937, or Pushkin Divided", a talk by Klara Moricz
Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Klára Móricz is Joseph E. and Grace. W. Valentine Professor at Amherst College. Her book Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music was published by the University of California Press in 2008, and the volume Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, co-edited with Simon Morrison, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Her edition of volume 42 (Concerto for Orchestra) of the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition (G. Henle Verlag, Edition Musica Budapest) appeared in 2017. She is co-editor of two anthologies for The Oxford History of Western Music. Her articles appeared in the Journal of American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, American Music, Journal of Jewish Identities, Pushkin Review, Vienna Slavic Yearbook, and Twentieth-Century Music. She has contributed essays, among others, to Western Music and Race (2007), Stravinsky and His World (2013), and Modernism and Opera (2016). She was co-editor of the Journal of Musicology (2009–2015) and has served on the board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Oxford Handbooks on Music, Jewish Music Forum, AMS Jewish Studies, and the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition. She has recently completed a book, In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Composing the Exilic Experience in Russian Paris.

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"Stalin: Waiting for Hitler", a talk by Stephen Kotkin
Friday, February 22, 2019

Stephen Kotkin is the John P. Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is also a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He directs Princeton's Institute for International and Regional Studies and co-directs its Program in the History and Practice of Diplomacy. His books include Uncivil Society, Armageddon Averted, and Magnetic Mountain. Kotkin was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928.
This talk is sponsored by the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series Fund at Amherst College and the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. 

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2018

"Breakup of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: Similarities, Dissimilarities or a Continuum of Imperial Transformations", a talk by Alexander Semyonov
Tuesday, December 4, 2018

This talk addresses the tectonic shift in thinking about empire and nation in contemporary historical writing and, in particular, the critique of the teleological assumption of ubiquitous transition from empire to the nation-state as the vector of modern history. The talk summarizes the recent literature on the problem of diversity in the moment of breakup of the Russian empire and Soviet Union, advances diachronic comparison of two historical events, and suggests an alternative framework of imperial transformation that captures the horizons of expectations of political actors during the reform processes in the Russian empire and Soviet Union and the persistence of the problem of diversity in the post-imperial political arrangements. 

Prof. Semyonov is a historian of modern Russian history, his research interests include political and intellectual history, history of empire and nationalism. He is also interested in the emerging field of global history and dialogue between new imperial history and global history. He has published on the intellectual and political history of Russian liberalism and liberal imperialism, history of political reforms, revolutions, and the first Russian parliament in the early twentieth century, history of Russian social sciences and their global connections. Since 2000 he has been a co-founding member of the editorial board of Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space.

The talk is sponsored by the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, the Georges Lurcy Lecture Series at Amherst College, and the Lucius Root Eastman 1895 Fund at Amherst College.

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"Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action", a book symposium 
Saturday, December 1, 2018

The Amherst Center for Russian Culture holds a book symposium and celebration of Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action, edited by Julie A. Buckler, Julie A. Cassiday, and Boris Wolfson. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into the dialog for the first time and shows that performance is a vital means for understanding Russia's culture from the reign of Peter the Great to the era of Putin. Hailed as a “milestone in Russian studies,” Russian Performances was published in August 2018 by the University of Wisconsin Press. 

This is a book symposium featuring scholars in performance studies — Daniel Sack, University of Massachusetts-Amherst — and Russian cultural studies — Emma Widdis, Cambridge University — who will offer their observations on the book and will be joined by the three editors for a discussion.

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"Resurrecting the Mammoth: Fieldnotes from Siberia", a talk by Anya Bernstein
Wednesday, November 28, 2018

This presentation explores two interrelated efforts: Pleistocene Park, an experimental nature reserve in Arctic Siberia, which aspires to restore the so-called mammoth steppe ecosystem from the late Pleistocene as a way to preserve the melting permafrost and slow down climate change, and the efforts of the American and global de-extinction movement to produce a "mammoth" or rather its ecological proxy through genetic engineering with its subsequent reintroduction to Pleistocene Park. A third, independent Russian-Korean initiative to resurrect the mammoth through cloning will also be discussed. 
As an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, Anya Bernstein’s main work has been on the changing geopolitical imaginaries of mobile religious communities across Eurasia. Her book, Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (Chicago, 2013), explores the transformation of Buddhist practice among a Siberian indigenous people known as Buryats, foremost through their post-Soviet renewal of transnational ties with their fellow co-religionists across north and south Asia. To capture these issues ethnographically, Bernstein conducted multi-sited field research in Buryat communities in Siberia as well as in Tibetan monasteries in India where some Buryat monks currently receive their religious education. The book focuses on the ways in which religion and politics have intersected under conditions of rapid social change in terms raised by recent work on sovereignty and post-socialism. As a visual anthropologist, Bernstein has directed, filmed, and produced several award-winning documentary films on Buryat Buddhism and shamanism, including Join Me in Shambhala (2002) and In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman (2006). Bernstein's current project is titled "The Post-Soviet Culture Wars: Blasphemy, Iconoclasm, and the Secular in Contemporary Russia".

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"The Song of Igor's Campaign", a talk by Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya
Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Drawing on manuscript collations and findings in the Roman Jakobson Papers at MIT, the Vladimir Nabokov Papers at the Library of Congress and the Berg Collection at the NYPL, this paper examines the early variant manuscripts of Nabokov’s translation of The Song of Igor’s Campaign, the anonymous Old Rus epic whose antiquity remains the subject of scholarly debate. Nabokov’s decade­-long collaboration with Roman Jakobson was intended to produce a scholarly edition of the “Song.” Instead, it resulted in an acrimonious ideologized rift: Nabokov went on to publish his translation of the “Song” with his own commentary; Jakobson’s book was never finished. 

Where Jakobson sought to eliminate all doubts concerning the “Song” and its twelfth-­century provenance, Nabokov sidestepped the authenticity debate to define the epic (whatever its origin) as a work of Great Art. Despite these fundamental differences, Nabokov’s published translation of the “Song” advances a text and a model of scholarly activity that owes much to Jakobson. If Nabokov’s earliest drafts adapt translation to philology in a performance that is at once “reverent” and “ironic,” terms that might also meta-textually describe Nabokov’s relationship to his then mentor, his published edition reveals not the displacement of Jakobson’s work by his own, but a condensation of the two in which philological discourse cannot be distinguished from a performance of it. 

Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya (Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Los Angeles) is Associate Professor of Slavic in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics and Courtesy Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature and co-editor with Mark Lipovetsky of Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader. Her current book project Collecting Objects, Materializing Ethics investigates the relationship between collections of material objects and narrative in the work of writer-collectors. 

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"The Woman with the Movie Camera", a talk by Lilya Kaganovsky
Monday, September 24, 2018

Lilya Kaganovsky will continue her inquiry into the question of a "Soviet women’s cinema” with this presentation on the cinematography of Margarita Pilikhina, the camerawoman on Marlen Khutsiev’s Thaw-era classic film Lenin’s Guard/ I am Twenty (Zastava Il’icha / Mne dvadtsat’ let). Kaganovsky looks at Pilikhina's work on the film as part of the new wave of Soviet cinema in the 1960s, but also in the context of her other, conventionally Socialist Realist films. This talk will take into consideration other Soviet female cinematographers, including Tamara Lobova and Marina Goldvoskaya, as well as Iana Sekste, who in 2013 played the role of a camerawoman in Valery Todorovsky’s The Thaw (Ottepel’), in the broader context of Western feminist film theory and the history of women’s participation in the cinema industries in Hollywood and beyond.

Lilya Kaganovsky is Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media & Cinema Studies, and the Director of the Program in Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include How the Soviet Man was Unmade (Pittsburgh, 2008); the edited volumes Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s (Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing, Duke, 2013) and Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, Indiana, 2014); and articles on Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and regularly contributes film reviews to the online cinema journal KinoKultura. Her most recent book on Soviet cinema’s transition to sound, The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928-1935, was published by Indiana University Press in spring 2018.

"Beyond Interference: Soviet and Russian Lessons for American Multiculturalism", a talk by Steven Lee
Thursday, April 5, 2018

Russian interference in the 2016 elections included the manipulation of U.S. identity politics: for instance, fake social media accounts promoted rallies both for and against the Black Lives Matter movement, apparently with the intent of exacerbating social discord. The new Cold War here merges with our new culture wars. 

This sorry circumstance finds a hopeful precedent from the old Cold War when Jim Crow was a favorite topic for Soviet propaganda, which indirectly led to U.S. civil rights reform. Building on this precedent, Steven Lee's talk focused on how Soviet and Russian discourses on race, ethnicity, and nationality might open new ways of conceptualizing multiculturalism here in the U.S. Lee argued that in the Soviet Union, one’s identity as a minority subject could be simultaneously essential yet irrelevant, eternal yet absent—a phenomenon Lee traced back to both official nationalities policy and avant-gardist performance. The result was a layered, estranged approach to identity, one that possibly contributed to the USSR’s collapse but which also provides a useful complement to contemporary U.S. discourses of “otherness” and “intersectionality.”

As a case in point, Lee then discussed the half-Korean, half-Russian rock star Viktor Tsoi (the Kurt Cobain of late socialism), the difficulty of ascribing any fixed identity to him, and his 1990 visit to the Sundance Film Festival.

Steven Lee ’01 is an associate professor in the Department of English at UC Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Korean Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is the author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (Columbia UP, 2015), co-winner of the 2016 Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the MLA. He is currently co-editing a volume about the international circulation of leftist cultures, entitled Comintern Aesthetics (under contract, University of Toronto Press).

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"Violence against LGBT People in Russia after the "Propaganda" Law", a talk by Alexander Kondakov
Wednesday, April 4, 2018

The law against “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” (homosexuality) has operated in Russia since 2013. It legitimized homophobia, causing a wave of increased violence resulting in hate crimes (bashing, abuse, homicide) against people identified as lesbians, gay men or transgender. Alexander Kondakov's research sought to identify the sources of data for further statistical generalization. As a result, he collected texts of court decisions on criminal law sentences of violence against members of the Russian LGBT community. The generated data shows the existing dynamics of hate crime against LGBT in Russia characterized by dramatic growth in such crimes after the adoption of the “propaganda” bill. The texts of the legal sentences are powerful enunciations of juridico-political discourse supported by institutions of criminal law and politics of hate. Alexander traces what he calls the “violent affections” in the politics of current Russian administration as it manages peoples’ hate towards queers.

 Alexander Kondakov is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the European University at St. Petersburg and researcher at the Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief for the Journal of Social Policy Studies published by the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Currently, he is a Wisconsin Russia Project Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. For a decade, Kondakov’s work has been primarily focused on law and sexuality studies, more specifically on queer sexualities in Russia. He is the author of the report on hate crimes against queers in Russia that have shown the rise of violence after the adoption of the gay propaganda bill. He has also published articles in Sexualities, Social and Legal Studies, and Feminist Legal Studies, among others.

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"Intimacy Amid Catastrophe: Diaries of the Leningrad Blockade", a talk by Alexis Peri
Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Alexis Peri is an Assistant Professor of history at Boston University. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California Berkeley, and she is a historian of modern Europe, focusing on the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. She is the author of several articles and the recent book, The War Within: Diaries of the Leningrad Blockade (Harvard University Press, 2017). Her current book project, under contract with Harvard University Press, is entitled: Dear Unknown Friend: Soviet and American Women Discover the Power of the Personal. It examines the early Cold War through thousands of letters exchanged between women of the US and USSR in which they advocated for peace and women's rights in the face of McCarthyism and Stalinist repression.

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A Reading and Conversation with Linor Goralik
Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Linor Goralik is an award-winning contemporary Russian writer of flash fiction, poetry, essays, fairy tales, theater, and more.  On Wednesday, February 28 at 4:30 she read from and discuss Found Life, her first book to appear in English.

Born in Ukraine and residing in Israel, Goralik is one of the first Russian writers to make a name for herself on the Internet. Her conversational short works conjure the absurd in all its forms, reflecting post-Soviet life and daily universals. Goralik’s mastery of the minimal, including a wide range of experiments in different forms of micro-prose, is on full display in Found Life. Condensed to the extreme, her language captures a vivid picture of fleeting interactions in a quickly moving world.

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2017

“Tales and Visions of Elena Guro: A Woman in the Russian Avant-Garde”
Friday, April 21-Saturday, April 22, 2017

The Amherst Center for Russian Culture hosted an international symposium on the work of avant-garde writer and artist Elena Guro (1877-1913), the first of its kind in the US. Guro was the earliest of the “Russian Amazons,” the women who emerged as leading artists of the avant-garde in the pre-revolutionary period. She also wrote experimental stories, poems, and plays, making her the rare woman who contributed to the European avant-garde of the time.

The opening event took place in the Rotherwas Room of the Mead Art Museum on Friday, April 21. During the reception, composer and musician John McDonald performed original piano pieces by Mikhail Matiushin, Guro’s husband and a leading figure in the Petersburg avant-garde. The scores are rarities from the archives of the Russian Center and have never been performed together. The symposium, “Tales and Visions of Elena Guro,” took place on Saturday, April 22, in the Russian Center and featured panels on her achievements in writing and art.

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“The KGB: Ruthless Sword, Imperfect Shield,” a talk by Amir Weiner
Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017

Based on hitherto untapped KGB archives and first-ever interviews with KGB officers, this talk by Professor Amir Weiner from Stanford University explored the history of the Soviet state security apparatus from its inception to the present day and seeks to explore key questions: Who was the KGB? Who were its agents, informants, and officers? How did they obtain information, and what did they know or want to know about their population? How did KGB officers, many of whom understood that they engaged in unethical activities even by the norms of the Soviet state, justify their actions, such as blackmail, coercion or intimidation? How did the KGB cope with the challenges of the post-Stalin era, particularly the end to mass terror, the spillover of unrest from the restless satellites and the loss of a monopoly over information? How did the KGB adjust to the decline in the party-state authority and the rise of dissent, restless youth and secessionist national movements and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union? Finally, and most importantly, when and how did the KGB’s obsessive gathering of information overwhelm and undermine the organization itself, and ultimately, the Soviet state?

Amir Weiner is a professor of history at Stanford University. He is the author of Making Sense of WarLandscaping the Human Garden and numerous articles and edited volumes on the impact of World War II on the Soviet polity, the social history of WWII and Soviet frontier politics. His forthcoming book, The KGB: Ruthless Sword, Imperfect Shield, will be published by Yale University Press in 2018. He is currently working on a collective autobiography of KGB officers titled Coffee with the KGB: Conversations with Soviet Security Officers.

Presentation by Latvian Russophone poet Semyon Khanin
Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2017

Semyon Khanin, visiting from Riga, Latvia, is a Russian poet with three books of poetry to his name, a translator of Latvian poetry into Russian, and the editor of numerous poetry collections of Russian and Latvian poets. He compiled an anthology of Latvian/Russian poetry titled Poems in Russian Written by Latvian Poets(2011), the first of its kind. His books have been translated into Latvian, Czech, Ukrainian, Serbian and Italian. He is one of the key members of the multimedia poetry project Orbita, a creative group of poets and artists whose works aim at creating a dialogue between various cultures and genres (which include literature, music, video, and photography, among others). His poems in English translation appeared in the anthology Hit Parade: The Orbita group (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015).


2016

“Non-Fiction as a Substitute for Fiction in a Post-Totalitarian Society: The Case of Svetlana Alexievich,” a talk by Professor Ilya Kukulin
Friday, Feb. 12, 2016

Kukulin spoke about Svetlana Alexievica, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her non-fiction. Alexievica draws from historical fact and oral histories to address such subjects as the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Chernobyl disaster. Kukulin’s most recent book, on Soviet montage, was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize last year, the oldest independent literary prize awarded in Russia.

Mikhail Bychkov: “Making Theater in Today's Russia”
Thursday, Oct. 6, 2016

Mikhail Bychkov, widely known in the Russian performing arts community as the founder of the Voronezh Chamber Theater and the International Platonov Festival, was chosen this year as chair of the jury for the Golden Mask National Theater Prize, Russia’s equivalent of the Tony Awards, in recognition of his contributions to Russian theater. His presentation will focus on the place of Russian theater in the cultural transformation that has taken place over the past quarter of a century. Bychkov's perspective is especially valuable because he has played a leading role in shaping and developing theater in Russia’s regions, which is where the visionary theater-makers of the New Russian Drama movement have come from, and which are now viewed, in Moscow and Petersburg, as incubators of the most far-reaching cultural experimentation.


2015

Dylan Schneider ’06: “Bringing Slavic Absurdism to the Operatic Stage”
Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015

Dylan Schneider received his Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Chicago in 2013, having studied with composers Shulamith Ran and Marta Ptaszynska. Strip-Tease is the 27-minute opera Dr. Schneider created for his dissertation, and he is now working on a companion piece based on the short story by Andrei Sinyavsky who for many years as a Russian dissident published his prose under the pseudonym Abram Terz. Dr. Schneider discussed both the Polish and Russian texts and the operas for which they serve as librettos against the larger background of Slavic absurdism during the 1960s through the 1980s which they reflect. A screening of Strip-Tease and a reception followed.

“Who, What Am I? Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self”
Monday, May 4, 2015

A leading cultural historian of 19th- and 20th-century Russia, Irina Paperno has, throughout her scholarly career, focused on the multifaceted relationship between life as it is lived and as it is represented and given meaning to by the written word. Her books have transformed the field’s understanding of the place of the literary text and the individual life on the broader stage of Russian culture and provoked a reassessment of longstanding assumptions about the Russian literary canon and its relationship to Russian and Soviet history.

Paperno’s latest monograph, just out from Cornell University Press, develops her interests in the history of private life and the intellectual sources of the concepts of self. It offers an account of Leo Tolstoy's lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits and, ultimately, to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience. As it guides the readers through Tolstoy’s voluminous, highly personal nonfiction writings, the book reflects on the problems of self and narrative as well as provides an intellectual and psychological biography of the writer. Irina Paperno will discuss her book in the broader context of interpreting the large, diverse corpus of nonfiction writings by Russian writers. Sponsored by the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, the Department of Russian at Amherst College and the Eastman Lecture Fund.


2014

Out of Steppe: Borodin’s Prince Igor and Operatic Russia’s Seductive “Other”
Friday, Feb. 28, 2014

Renowned opera critic David Shengold ’81 presented an illustrated talk entitled with musical examples.

U.S.-Russia Relations: From Reset to Rethink
Monday, April 7, 2014

The Amherst College Center for Russian Culture presented a talk by Dr. Andrew Kuchins ’81, a senior fellow and director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He is an internationally known expert on Russian foreign and domestic policies who publishes widely and is frequently called on by business, government, media, and academic leaders for comment and consulting on Russian and Eurasian affairs.


2013

Russian-English Poetry Reading by Maria Stepanova
Monday, April 1, 2013

A winner of Russia’s top literary prize, Moscow poet Maria Stepanova read her original poetry along with new English translations. Stepanova is one of the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture, a founder and editor of today’s most influential online journal. As one of the most important poets working today, she addresses contemporary themes through skillfully distorted forms and language. The reading was followed by a question-and-answer session in English.


2012

A Symposium on Emigre Encounters: Exiles and Their Legacies
Friday, March 30-Saturday, March 31, 2012

The symposium began Friday with “Exiles on Screen: Russians in Hollywood,” a discussion by Professor Olga Matich (University of California, Berkeley), followed by a screening of “The Last Command” (1928). The following day began with opening remarks by Sergey Glebov (Amherst College/Smith College), followed by:

Session I: Émigré Cultures
Chair: Boris Wolfson (Amherst College)
Catherine Ciepiela (Amherst College): Tsvetaeva and Anti-Colonial Paris
Lazar Fleishman (Stanford University): Lev Gomolitskii and Russian Poets in Inter-War Poland
Klara Moricz (Amherst College): Modernist Identities: Artur Lourie and Igor Stravinsky
Sergey Glebov (Amherst/Smith College): Russian Saids: Critiques of Colonialism in the Russian Emigration
Discussant: Polina Barskova (Hampshire College)

Session II: Émigré Scholarship and Culture
Chair: Bryn Geffert (Amherst College)
Laurie Manchester (Arizona State University): Missionizing Diaspora: Colonial Fantasies Among First Wave Émigrés
Alla Zeide (Independent Scholar): Mikhail Karpovich and George Vernadsky: Two Names in One Breath
Olga Matich (University of California, Berkeley): The Case of Vasilii Shul'gin
Discussant: Vera Shevzov (Smith College)

Roundtable Discussion: Émigré Legacies: Archives, Collections, Collectors
John Bowlt (USC), Stanley Rabinowitz (Amherst College)
Fr. Vladimir von Tsurikov (Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary, Jordanville, NY/Foundation for Russian Culture)

“Remembering The Rite of Spring,” a lecture by Stephen Walsh
Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012

Stravinsky’s views on all his most famous works changed over the years, but The Rite of Spring was a particular case, partly because he had difficulty getting the notation of the score as he wanted it, partly because he lost interest in the ethnic aspects of the subject, partly because of issues to do with the way the work was, or should be, performed. Walsh, a critic, and musicologist who is currently Professor in Music at Cardiff University, Wales, gave a talk tracing these changes down the years, drawing some conclusions about Stravinsky's creative methods and his attitudes to his own past work.

“The Birth of Fiction from the Spirit of Music: My Novel Leningrad, from Literary Text to Screen Version,” a lecture by Igor Vishnevetsky
Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2012

Vishnevetsky is an Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the American Studio of the Moscow Art Theater and of English at the Russian State University for the Humanities.


2011

A Late Afternoon of Russian Music
Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Vocal and instrumental selections from Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev performed by Julia Moorman ’11, mezzo-soprano; Michiko Theurer ’11, violin; Dana Kaufman ’12, piano; Roger Creed ’13, piano; Lori Milbiev UM ’11, piano; Bor Liang UM ’11, tenor; and The Amherst Madrigal Singers. Followed by a reception.

Poetry reading by Eugene Ostashevsky
Thursday, March 10, 2011

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet. He has published two collections of poems, Iterature and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, which showcase his playful erudition. He has edited and translated for the first English-language anthology of writings by the Russian absurdists of the 1920s-30s (titled Oberiu) and also translates contemporary Russian poets. He is currently working on a book about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot. He teaches literature at New York University and is associated with Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, New York.

Poetry reading by Anna Glazova
Monday, April 11, 2011

Anna Glazova is a poet who teaches at Cornell University and writes on questions of tradition, translation, and quotation in poetry and fiction. She has published several studies of Celan's translations of Mandelstam's poetry and has translated into Russian works by two prominent figures of European modernism, Robert Walser and Unica Zürn. Her first book of poetry, Pust' i voda (2003), was shortlisted for Andrei Bely Prize. Poems from her second book, Pyetlya. Nyevpolovinu (2008) appeared in English translation in a volume entitled Twice under the Sun (2008). Glazova read her poetry in Russian with English translations.

“The Battle of the Moderns over the Ancients: Russian Modernism and the Revival of the Pagan Gods,” a lecture by Professor Michael Kunichika, Slavic Department, New York University
Thursday, Nov. 3, 2011


2010

Joseph Brodsky: A Symposium at Amherst College
Saturday, Oct. 9, 2010

- Joseph Brodsky: Contexts and Reception, a panel presentation by Catherine Ciepiela (Amherst College), Mikhail Gronas (Dartmouth College), Andrew Kahn (Oxford University), Maria Khotimsky (Harvard University), and Yaskov Klots (Yale University)
- Beyond Ideology: Russian Art of the 1950s-1970s from the Collection of Thomas P. Whitney, an event held at Amherst College's Mead Art Museum
- Brodsky in Camera, a conversation between photographers Mikhail Milchik (Saint Petersburg) and Jerome Liebling (Amherst College)
- Reading Brodsky Together, a close reading of a poem by Brodsky by Polina Barskova (Hampshire College).

David Shengold ’81 to Talk About Musorgsky's “Boris Godunov”
Sunday, Oct. 17, 2010

Opera critic David Shengold ’81 discussed Musorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov,” performed by the Met in a much-anticipated new production the following fall. The simulcast of the opera took place the following Saturday, Oct. 23.

Poetry Reading by Arkady Dragomoshchenko & Tatiana Shcherbina
Monday, Nov. 1, 2010

The Amherst Center for Russian Culture will host a reading by two prominent Russian Poets, Arkady Dragomoshchenko of Petersburg and Tatiana Shcherbina of Moscow. Dragomoshchenko is the leader of the so-called language poetry in Russia, and he has collaborated with the American language poet Lyn Hejinian. Shcherbina became well known as an underground poet in the 80s, and she is also recognized as a translator of French poetry. The poets will read in Russian, accompanied by English translations.