Spring 2019

February 3, Sunday. Ida Lang Recital Hall (Hunter North, 4th Floor). 2 - 8 pm.
Eighth Annual Diaspora - Israeli-Russian Film Festival

February 7, Thursday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 4 pm
Dmitry Bykov (Moscow). "Lolita, Quiet Flows the Don, and Doctor Zhivago: The Metaplot of a Revolutionary Novel." Lecture

February 20, Wednesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West). 5:30 pm
Aleksei Nikitin (Kyiv). "Ukrainian Literature in the Russian Language: A New Phenomenon that Causes Debates." Lecture

February 26, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West). 5:30 pm
Stanislav Lvovsky (Oxford, UK). Poems from the Book and Other Poems. Bilingual poetry reading

March 12, Tuesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm
Dmitry Kuzmin (Latvia). "Reframing Russian Poetry in the 1990s." Lecture and poetry reading

March 26, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West). 5:30 pm
Zara Torlone (Miami University, Oxford, OH). "“Joy of Exile: Ovid in the Poetry of Pushkin, Mandelshtam, and Brodsky.” Lecture

April 9, Tuesday. Lang Recital Hall (Hunter North, 4th Floor). 6:30 pm
Psoy Korolenko and Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto). Yiddish Glory. The Lost Songs of WWII. Live performance

April 12, Friday. B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West). 4 pm 
Vladimir Kozlov. "Perestroika Punks: Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s." Lecture followed by a screening of Traces on the Snow (Russia, 2014)

April 15, Monday. B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West). 5:30 pm
Lev Ozerov. "Portraits without Frames." Bilingual poetry reading and book talk with the translators

May 2, Thursday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm
Crystal Swan (Belarus, USA, Germany, Russia; 2018) by Darya Zhuk | Film screening and Q&A
Eighth Annual Diaspora - Israeli-Russian Film Festival. February 3, Sunday. Ida Lang Recital Hall (Hunter North, 4th floor). 2-8 pm. Hosted by the Russian-American Cultural Center (RACC). Free and open to the public

The festival presents works by filmmakers from the former Soviet Union that explore the experience of immigration and the search for a new cultural identity, while celebrating their artistic achievements in film media. In the spirit of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the special guest of this year's festival is Boris Maftsir, author of The Unknown Holocaust series, which uncovers the forgotten places of massacres on the territory of the former USSR and features accounts by local eyewitnesses. The first film of the festival, however, Here and Now by Roman Shumunov, deals with contemporary reality as it depicts the life of underprivileged Russian-speaking immigrant youth in a provincial Israeli town.

PROGRAM

2 PM | Opening remarks

2:15 PM | Here and Now by Roman Shumumov
Israel 2018 | 90 min | Drama | Russian, Hebrew and English subtitles

A social drama narrated by four young immigrant friends living in a poor neighborhood in the Israeli city of Ashdod. Surviving from day to day, they form a rap group and devote their time to rehearsals for the upcoming international music festival. They believe that winning the music competition will allow them to make their voice heard to change their harsh reality. Their dream to take part in the competition seems shattered by the crisis in the family of Andrei, the main character. Such chores as taking care of his father, who has been in hospital for several months, being responsible for his younger sister and for mortgage payments, deprive him of the opportunity to continue rehearsing. The search for a solution leads him into the world of organized crime, but his bandmates are desperate to help him, risking not only their dreams, but also their lives.

4:00 PM | The Road to Babi Yar by Boris Maftsir
Israel 2018 | 107 min | Documentary | Ukrainian, Russian, English, Hebrew with English & Hebrew subtitles | USA Premiere

The Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. This film tells the story of how and why, during the first months of the German offensive in the Ukraine, the mass extermination of Jews across hundreds of mass murder sites developed – and Babi Yar became their symbol. The killing Aktion of more than 30,000 Jews in Kiev began on the hundredth day of the German attack on the Soviet Union.

4:50 PM | Drawers of Memory by Boris Maftsir
Israel 2016 | 80 min | Documentary | Latvian, Hebrew, German with English and Hebrew subtitles

In his sixth film of the project about the Shoah in the Former Soviet Union, filmmaker Boris Maftsir set out on a journey to uncover the memory of the Holocaust in Latvia, where he was born and lived until he made aliya to Israel in 1971. The “drawers of memory” open as the search exposes the complex history of Latvian Jews: before, during and after the Holocaust. They include an attempt to compile a full and detailed list of all Jews present in Latvia on the eve of WWII; the work of the Latvian “guardians of memory” who pursued the idea of recalling the image of their former Jewish neighbors; the personal "drawer" of Boris Maftsir's own memory.

7:15 PM | The Award ceremony of Boris Maftsir
Discussion with Boris Maftsir moderated by Oleg Sulkin
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Dmitry Bykov (Moscow). "Lolita, Quiet Flows the Don, and Doctor Zhivago: The Metaplot of a Revolutionary Novel." Lecture. February 7, Thursday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 4 pm.

Dmitry Bykov is one of Russia’s most versatile public intellectuals, a journalist, poet, novelist, critic, media figure and member of the political opposition. His strong opinions on politics, history, literature, film, education, and mass media resonate widely across the contemporary Russian society and beyond. His lecture at Hunter on three Russian authors whose names do not automatically come to mind together – Nabokov, Sholokhov and Pasternak – will address what, according to Bykov, they nonetheless share: the inner plot of a revolutionary novel.   
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Alexei Nikitin (Kyiv). "Ukrainian Literature in Russian: A New Phenomenon that Causes Debates." February 20, Wednesday, B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West), 5:30-7:30 pm. In Russian, with English translation.

Over the years of independence, Ukrainian society has undergone drastic changes, which have, unsurprisingly, affected the cultural life in the country. Contemporary Ukrainian literature, young and dynamic as it is, is both a product and a driving vehicle of these transformations. Ukrainian culture, much like its society, is heterogeneous and multilingual. A significant phenomenon of the past two decades is the emergence of new authors who write in Russian. The situation in Ukraine is thus quite unique insofar as there has never been so many authors, and of such caliber, writing in Russian. Is it enough grounds to speak of the formation of Ukrainian literature in the Russian language? If so, what are its functions in the multicultural Ukrainian society? What is its scale? And is it possible to predict how these processes will unfold in the next few decades and in the current political climate?

Alexei Nikitin, born in Kyiv, Ukraine, is a prose writer and a member of the Ukrainian center of the International PEN-club. His books have been translated and published in Ukraine, Russia, United Kingdom, Italy, Switzerland and the United States. Nikitin is the author of several novels and numerous short stories including Рука птицелова (The Bird Catcher’s Hand, 2000), awarded the Korolenko prize of the National Writers Union of Ukraine, for the best Ukrainian prose written in Russian; the novel Три жизни Сергея Бояршинова, банкира и художника (The Three Lives of Sergey Boyarshinov, a Banker and Artist, 2003), a collection of short prose Окно на базар (A Window to the Market, 2004), as well as Istemi (2011), Mahjong (2012), and Victory Park (2014). In 2014 Victory Park was awarded the Russian Prize, which honors extraordinary prose works written in Russian by authors not living in Russia. In 2016 the Ukrainian publishing house “Lyuta Sprava”, based in Kiev, published his short novel entitled Санитар с Институтской (A Paramedic from Institutska St.). The same year Druzhba Narodov, due to political reasons, published it under a different title Shkil-Mozdil. The setting for most of Nikitin’s writings is Kyiv, Ukraine where he lives.
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Stanislav Lvovsky (Oxford, UK). Poems from the Book and Other Poems. February 26, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West). 5:30-7:30 pm.

Stanislav Lvovsky (b. 1972) was born in Moscow and has worked in advertising, cultural events management, and journalism. Lvovsky is former editor-in-chief of the “Literature” section of Openspace.ru/Colta.ru and winner of several Russian literary awards including, among others, Andrey Bely Prize (2017, for the poetry collection Poems from the Book and Other Poems). He is the author of six published collections of poetry, one short story collection and one novel (written in co-authorship with Linor Goralik). One of his poems was the basis of the project “Quiet War Songs” (2015) by six contemporary Russian composers as well as for the contemporary dance performance “Parasomnias”. Lvovsky regularly publishes articles on political and social issues as well as on cultural history and contemporary Russian poetry in various periodicals and academic journals. His poetry has been translated into and published in English, French, Chinese, Italian and other languages. Currently, he is finishing his DPhil thesis on Soviet cultural history at the University of Oxford.
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Photo © Oleg Yakovlev
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Dmitry Kuzmin (Riga, Latvia). "Reframing Russian Poetry in the 1990s." Lecture followed by poetry reading. March 12, Tuesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm.

For decades following WWII, Russian literature remained bifurcated into the official and unofficial subfields, which were perceived as completely autonomous from each other. In the 1990s, the entire body of Russian poetry underwent a massive reframing and restructuring. Many new institutions came into being, while the old ones changed their messages; a new set of key literary figures emerged from the underground, where they had previously earned their reputations, to an ever wider acclaim in the new society. What tendencies conditioned the development of Russian poetry during that period, and what legacy have the 1990s left for the present day? Dmitry Kuzmin, an active participant of the transitional reforms in the literary life of the country at the turn of the century, will share his experiences and opinions on this pivotal moment in the history of Russian poetry and culture.

Dmitry Kuzmin (b.1968) graduated from Moscow State Pedagogical University. In 1989 he founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets, an organizational hub for Moscow’s experimental poetry scene. He has been the head of ARGO-RISK Publishers since 1993, editor of the Vavilon Internet project (www.vavilon.ru) since 1996, and editor in chief of the quarterly poetry magazine Vozdukh [Air] since 2006. From 1996 to 2002 he ran Risk, the first Russian magazine for gay writing. He won the 2002 Andrei Bely Prize for Merit in Literature, and his selected poems and translations, Хорошо быть живым (It’s Good to Be Alive) won the Moskovsky Schet [Moscow Count] award for the best debut poetry collection. His poems have been published in England, France, Poland, China, Italy, Estonia, and Slovenia, and in the United States in A Public Space, St. Petersburg Review, Habitus, Aufgabe, and Fulcrum. His other publications include Russian translation of works by Auden, Cummings, Stevens, and Ashbery, as well as French and Ukrainian poets. In 2014, he was as a visiting professor at Princeton University. The same year he moved from Moscow to Latvia, where he has lived ever since. Among his most recent initiatives is the Latvia-based publishing house and residency Literature without Borders.
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Zara Torlone (Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University, Oxford, OH). "Joy of Exile: Ovid in the Poetry of Pushkin, Mandelshtam, and Brodsky." March 26, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West), 5:30 - 7:30 pm.

For Russian poets Ovid was an archetypal exile through whom they interpreted their own complex relationship with their motherland. This talk unearths some of the complex contexts surrounding the narrative of exile in three Russian poets (Pushkin, Mandelshtam, Brodsky) by delving into the archaeology of the national poetic memory as it is reflected in the cultural poetics of each poet.
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Psoy Korolenko and Anna Shternshis. Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II. April 9, Tuesday. Ida Lang Recital Hall (Hunter North, 4th Floor). 6:30 pm. C0-hosted by the Russian and Slavic Studies Program, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Department of Music of Hunter College.

Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II is music created during the darkest chapter of European Jewish history. In the midst of World War II, a group of scholars led by ethnomusicologist Moisei Beregovsky (1892-1961) discovered songs written by Jewish Red Army soldiers, refugees, victims and survivors of Ukrainian ghettos. One song was written by a 10-year-old orphan who lost his family in the ghetto in Tulchin, another by a teenage prisoner of the Pechora concentration camp, and yet another about a Red Army soldier who learns, upon his return to Kiev, that his family had been murdered in Babi Yar. These were the people, whose voices are rarely heard in reconstructing history, none of them professional poets or musicians, but all at the center of the most important historical event of the 20th century, and making sense of it through music. Following the war, the researchers were arrested during Stalin’s anti-Jewish purge. The scholars’ works were confiscated, and they died thinking the collection was lost to history. The songs were discovered in unmarked boxes stored in the archives of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in the 1990s.

In the early 2000s, a lucky coincidence brought Yiddish Professor Anna Shternshis of the University of Toronto to Kiev where she learned that these songs had survived all of these decades. Quickly deteriorating, fragile documents, some typed, but most hand-written, contained some of the most poignant and historically important Soviet Yiddish songs of World War II. The album, released February 2018 is the result of a remarkable collaboration between artist Psoy Korolenko and Anna Shternshis, recently nominated for the Grammy Award. Although some archival documents had their melodies preserved, most were simply lyrics written on small scraps of paper. Psoy Korolenko engaged in “musical archaeology,” and analyzed the scarce supplementary notes, contextualized the lyrics and then took a leap of imagination in order to create or adapt music for the texts.

Many pieces were the first grassroots testimonies of German atrocities against Jews, detailing massacres in Babi Yar, Tulchin, Pechora and others places in Ukraine. Sometimes, composing music calling to fight against fascism was the first thing a person did prior to the invasion by the German Army, and sometimes it was the last act during one’s final moments. The raw emotional ballads convey despair, hope, humor, bravery, resistance and revenge. The album “Yiddish Glory” is a time capsule that reveals how Jewish men, women and children fought against fascism, tried against all odds to save their families, and in their final moments chose to reveal their hopes and dreams through music. For the first time, the public will hear the voices of the Soviet Jews who were thought to be silenced by Hitler and Stalin.
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Vladimir Kozlov. "Perestroika Punks: Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s." Lecture followed by a screening of Traces on the Snow (Russia, 2014) and Q&A. April 12, B126 (Chanin Language Center, Hunter West). 4-6 pm. 

Vladimir Kozlov was born in Mogilev, an industrial city in what was then the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic and is now the country of Belarus. He spent his childhood and adolescence on the suburbs of that city, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet empire and a bizarre mix of unbridled freedom, wild capitalism and rampant crime in the early 1990s before moving to Minsk and later to Moscow. Kozlov has a dozen of fiction and non-fiction books to his name, many of which have been shortlisted or long-listed for major book prizes. He is the winner of the prestigious Made in Russia award in the Literature category (2013) and was also nominated for GQ Russia’s Writer of the Year in 2011 and 2012. Kozlov's novels and short stories have been published in translation in the United States, France, Serbia and Slovakia. His debut as a film director was in 2013 with an adaptation of his novella Desyatka (Number Ten), which collected the Bronze Award at the debut film festival Spirit of Fire in Khanty-Mansiisk (Russia). Kozlov subsequently made Sledy na snegu (Traces in the Snow), a groundbreaking documentary about the influential Siberian punk rock movement of the 1980s, and the features Kozha (Skin), Anomiya (Anomie) and Kak my zakhotim (Whatever We Want).
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Lev Ozerov. Portraits without Frames. Bilingual poetry reading and book talk with the translators Boris Dralyuk, Irina Mashinski and Maria Bloshteyn. April 15, Monday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30-7:30 pm. With the New York Review of Books.

Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames (NYRB, 2018) offers fifty shrewd and moving glimpses into the lives of Soviet writers, composers, and artists caught between the demands of art and politics. Some of the subjects—like Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Andrey Platonov, and Dmitry Shostakovich—are well-known, others less so. All are evoked with great subtlety and vividness, as is the fraught and dangerous time in which they lived. Composed in free verse of deceptively artless simplicity, Ozerov’s portraits are like nothing else in Russian poetry.
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Crystal Swan (Belarus, USA, Russia, Germany; 2018). Film screening followed by Q&A with Darya Zhuk, the director, and Helga Landauer, author of screenplay. May 2, Thursday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm.

In post-Soviet Belarus, unemployed raver Velya dreams of emigrating to the U.S. After purchasing blank letterhead and forging proof of employment to win a much coveted visa, her dream appears within reach… Until Velya realizes the American consulate plans to call the fake phone number on her application to confirm her employment. Velya’s only solution is to endure a week in a small factory town to convince the authorities of her supposed job. She locates the cramped Soviet apartment on the other end of the line, overrun by a family preparing for the wedding of their son. The imperious mother refuses to lie for her, but Velya negotiates a solution: she can answer the phone during business hours as if she works at the factory. But Velya’s presence soon upends both the family’s and the town’s order, with potentially disastrous consequences for all.

Crystal Swan premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival where it opened “East of the West” competition in July 2018. The film won Grand Prix at Odessa International Film Festival, Almaty International Film festival. At Vyborg Window to Europe in Russia, the film won the Best Coproduction Award and Russian Critics Award. Most recently, the film won the Audience Award at Pacific Meridian Film Festival in Vladivostok, Russia. It became an absolute hit in its home country of Belarus, beating box numbers of such audience favorites as Whiplash (dir. Damian Chazelle) and Youth (dir. by Paolo Sorrentino).

Belarus-born award-winning film director Darya Zhuk has been obsessing about filmmaking long enough to see her short films selected to SXSW, Tarkovsky, Oaxaca, Atlanta, Palm Springs, Koroche, Santa Fe Independent film festivals just to name a few. She is a graduate of Columbia University MFA program in Directing. Darya lives and creates between Minsk and Brooklyn. Crystal Swan is her feature debut.

The script was written by a recognized Russian poet, filmmaker and screenwriter Helga Landauer (Olshvang); Darya Zhuk co-wrote the script.

Praise for Crystal Swan:

 “the sort of blazing triumph that would hold even the sleepiest festivalgoer in rapt attention”
-- Roger Ebert / Matt Fagerholm
 
“winningly small, scrappy debut,” “irony-rich, tone-switching script”
-- Variety / Guy Lodge
 
“Vividly lensed by Brazilian Carolina Costa and featuring an engagingly vital performance by Alina Nassibulina, who evokes Madonna circa Desperately Seeking Susan, this East of the West opener at Karlovy Vary may well have some arthouse legs”
-- Screen Daily / Demetrios Matheou
 
“Crystal Swan boasts a luminous lead performance from rising Russian screen queen Alina Nasibullina, plus a sparky, sardonic script by Zhuk and Helga Laudauer”
-- The Hollywood Reporter / Stephen Dalton
 
“so effective at capturing the hopefulness of someone who’s seized by the promise of a better life.” “Zhuk was able to manifest her destiny and make it across the ocean, and her movie offers a compelling glimpse at why that may have been the only choice her country ever gave her”
-- IndieWire / David Erlich
 
“Confident and vital,” “a clever examination of individual ambition and a thoughtful exploration,” “a brilliant central performance, strong cinematography by Carolina Costa and bold direction by Zhuk”
-- Cineuropa / Laurence Boyce
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Hunter College, CUNY
Division of Russian and Slavic Studies
Dpt. of Classical and Oriental Studies
695 Park Avenue, Suite 1425 HW
New York, NY 10065
Email: russhunter@hunter.cuny.edu