FALL 2019

September 4, Wednesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 7 pm
Tomas Venclova. "The Holocaust and Lithuania Today"

September 12, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
"Notes from the Zone of Kaif: The Life and Work of Azazello - Hippie, Poet, Drug Addict and Artist"

September 24, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Screening of Anna Karenina (Vakhtangov Theater, Moscow), introduced by Eddie Aronoff (Stage Russia HD)

September 27, Friday. 510 Hunter North Building. 6:30 pm
Screening of Redemption (Russia, 2012) by Aleksandr Proshkin, introduced by Prof. Emil Draitser (Hunter College)

October 3, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Tamizdat Project Lab - 1: Anna Akhmatova. Requiem (1963).

October 10, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Mark Lipovetsky. "Cynicism and Freedom: a Paradox of the Soviet Trickster"

October 17, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm
Yuz Aleshkovsky. Nikolai Nikolaevich. Book talk and Q&A with the author
Tomas Venclova (Vilnius). "The Holocaust and Lithuania Today." September 4, Wednesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 7 pm. Co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at Hunter College. In partnership with Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in New York and the Lithuanian Culture Institute.

The talk will concentrate on the challenges of multiculturalism in contemporary Lithuania, with a special emphasis on Lithuanian-Jewish relations, remembrance of the Holocaust and the historical memory traumas. It will address the ongoing sharp public debates in Lithuania over the controversial historical figures of the Second World War that reveal an emerging divergence between public glorification of armed resistance as a secular religion and an intimate exploration of a troubled past.

Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet and scholar, professor emeritus at Yale University, former dissident and founding member of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. After a successful career in the U.S., where he emigrated in 1977, Venclova returned to his native Lithuania last year.
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Notes from the Zone of Kaif: The Life and Work of Azazello - Hippie, Poet, Drug Addict and Artist. A panel discussion and website launch. September 12, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm.

The panel presents the life and work of a Soviet hippie named Azazello within the broader framework of non-conformist culture in the Soviet Union. The panel presents an introduction and historical contextualization of Azazello’s life and unpublished archive, a reading of his poems in translation along with translator commentary, and a discussion of the pop-cultural subtexts in his poems and prose. The talk will address various aspects of the Soviet non-conformist culture as manifested in Azazello’s writing, including its engagement with Soviet and Western pop-culture, drug abuse, evocation of Western hippie philosophy, among others. The event is dedicated to the launch of the bilingual website dedicated to Azazello’s legacy by the Wende Museum of Cold War.

PRESENTERS:

Margarit Ordukhanyan (Hunter College, CUNY)
Juliane Fürst (Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam, Germany)
Polly McMichael (University of Nottingham, UK)
Anna Fishzon (Independent Scholar)
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A screening of Anna Karenina (Vakhtangov Theater, Moscow). Introduced by Eddie Aronoff. Sept. 24, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5 pm.

Staged by famed Lithuanian choreographer Anzelica Cholina, this multiple award-winning Vakhtangov Theatre production of Anna Karenina tells the story of Tolstoy’s classic novel entirely in contemporary dance. In this way, Cholina succeeds in finding the equivalent of Tolstoy's words in harmony and movement, with every gesture holding meaning. The distinctive music of Alfred Schnittke helps to reveal the inner turmoil of the characters and their depth. Captured on film before a live audience from Moscow's  Vakhtangov Theatre. Duration: 2 hours 15 min (with one 15 minute intermission). 

After years in the garment trade, Eddie Aronoff moved to Moscow in 2008 as an ESL teacher. In 2016, inspired by the remarkable stage productions he visited, Eddie hatched the idea of bringing small live Russian theatre performances to NYC. Unable to pull that off, but still very much interested in sharing these works, he convinced Russian theater managing directors  to allow a team he assembled to film the productions with the promise of delivering them to cinemas worldwide, thus launching Stage Russia HD. By the end of their current 4th Season, Stage Russia will have presented over 20 films on the big screen in over a dozen countries.

Free and open to the public, but seats are limited. Please RSVP below!
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Redemption by Aleksandr Proshkin (Russia, 2012; in RUSS with ENG subtitles; based on the novel by Friedrich Gorenstein). Film screening. Introduced by Prof. Emil Draitser (Hunter College). Sept. 27, Friday. Room 510, Hunter North Building. 6:30 pm.

It is New Year’s Eve 1945 in a small Soviet town not long liberated from German occupation. Sashenka, a headstrong and self-centered teenage girl, resents her mother for taking a lover after her father’s death in the war, and denounces her to the authorities for the petty theft that keeps them from going hungry. When she meets a Jewish lieutenant who has returned to bury his family, betrayed and murdered by their neighbors during the occupation, both must come to terms with the trauma that surrounds them as their relationship deepens.

Redemption by Friedrich Gorenstein is a stark and powerful portrait of humanity caught up in Stalin’s police state in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust. In this short novel, written in 1967 but unpublished for many years, Friedrich Gorenstein effortlessly combines the concrete details of daily life in this devastated society with witness testimonies to the mass murder of Jews. He gives a realistic account of postwar Soviet suffering through nuanced psychological portraits of people confronted with harsh choices and a coming-of-age story underscored by the deep involvement of sexuality and violence. Interspersed are flights of philosophical consideration of the relationship between Christians and Jews, love and suffering, justice and forgiveness. A major addition to the canon of literature bearing witness to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Redemption is an important reckoning with anti-Semitism and Stalinist repression from a significant Soviet Jewish voice.

Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002), born in Kiev, was a Soviet Jewish writer and screenwriter who collaborated with Andrei Tarkovsky on Solaris (1972), among other works. His father was arrested during Stalin’s purges and later shot. Unable to publish in the Soviet Union, Gorenstein emigrated to Berlin, where he lived until his death. An award-winning film adaptation of Redemption was released in 2012.

-- Columbia University Press, the "Russian Library" series
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Tamizdat Project Lab - 1: Anna Akhmatova. Requiem (1963). October 3, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm.

Tamizdat, coined as a derivative of samizdat (self-publishing) and gosizdat (state publishing), refers to the publishing industry “over there,” i.e. abroad. It stands for the corpus of manuscripts rejected, censored or never submitted for publication at home but smuggled through various channels out of the country and printed elsewhere, with or without their authors’ knowledge or consent, and not infrequently for the purpose of being sent back behind the Iron Curtain as ideologically subversive material. A powerful weapon on the literary fronts of the Cold War, tamizdat was as symbolic of late Soviet culture as its more familiar and better researched domestic counterparts, samizdat and gosizdat.
 
Tamizdat Project is a virtual environment that looks at the patterns of circulation, first publications and reception of contraband literary manuscripts from the USSR. It is an online archive of documents that deal with how and why masterpieces of Russian literature first appeared abroad long before they could see the light of day in Russia, already after Perestroika. Although its subject matter is historically finite, Tamizdat Project is an ever growing undertaking as the website is constantly populated with new content, including previously unpublished archival materials.

Tamizdat Project Lab, led by project director Yasha Klots (Hunter College), is a hands-on workshop, each devoted to the history of a literary manuscript on its way to publication. This inaugural workshop will take as a case study Anna Akhmatova’s famous poem “Requiem” (Munich, 1963). Composed decades earlier, “Requiem” had never been written down until 1962 and existed only orally, in the memory of the author and her closest friends. A slap in the face of Stalinism, it could not be published in Soviet Russia for ideological reasons even during the “warmest” years of Khrushchev’s Thaw. To read “Requiem” in the original, click here; in English click here; to hear Akhmatova recite “Requiem,” click here.

Tamizdat Project Lab is limited to 25 participants. Please RSVP below and let us know what languages you can work with. Knowledge of Russian is NOT required. Please bring your own laptop to participate in the workshop. If you cannot attend but are still interested in volunteering for Tamizdat Project, please click here! Looking forward to seeing you!
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Mark Lipovetsky. "Cynicism and Freedom: a Paradox of the Soviet Trickster." October 10, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30m pm.

“Trickster” does not simply mean “deceiver” or “rogue,” but rather “creative idiot” or “sacred clown.” The trickster is a typical comic protagonist, yet in Soviet and post-Soviet culture tricksters play a particular role that transcends the traditional picaro / rogue routine. Soviet tricksters exemplified by Ostap Bender became true superstars of the Soviet civilization (in its official and non-official realms alike), serving as the cultural justification for dangerous, non-heroic and cynical survival, by elevating it through their virtuoso performances to a level of joyful, cheeky and, most importantly, free play. How does freedom correlate with cynicism? Can cynicism serve as a vehicle for freedom? And what happens with the idea of freedom when it becomes inseparable from cynicism? These questions shed light on the vitality of the Soviet cultural legacy and its influence upon the post-Soviet one.

Born and educated in the former USSR, Mark Lipovetsky has lived and worked in the US since 1996. His research interests include  post-Soviet culture, Russian postmodernism, post-Soviet drama, late Soviet nonconformist culture, among others. He is the editor of a 5-volume collection of works by Dmitry Prigov, whose critical biography he is now writing. Lipovetsky’s own works have been were nominated for Russian Little Booker Prize (1997) and short-listed for the Andrey Bely Prize (2008).  In 2014, he received an award of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) for outstanding contribution to scholarship. A world-leading scholar of contemporary Russian literature and a literary critic, this year Mark Lipovetsky joined the faculty of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia.
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Yuz Aleshkovsky. Nikolai Nikolaevich. Book talk and Q&A with the author. October 3, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm. In partnership with Columbia University Press.

Yuz Aleshkovsky was born in 1929 in Krasnoyarsk and grew up in Moscow. He served in the Soviet navy and was imprisoned from 1950 to 1953 for “violating discipline.” He published children’s books but became best known for his songs and novels circulated in samizdat before he emigrated to the United States in 1979. Among contemporary Russian writers, Aleshkovsky stands out for his vivid imagination, his mixing of realism and fantasy, and his virtuosic use of the rich tradition of Russian obscene language. These two novels, written in the 1970s, display Aleshkovsky’s linguistic gifts and keen observations of Soviet life.

Nikolai Nikolaevich begins when its titular hero, a pickpocket by trade, is released from prison after World War II and finds a job in a Moscow biological laboratory. Starting out as a kind of janitor, he is soon recruited to provide sperm for strange experiments intended to create life in the Andromeda galaxy. The hero finds himself at the center of the 1948 purge of biological science in the Soviet Union, in a transgressive tale that joins science fiction (and science fact) with gulag slang and a love story. The protagonist and narrator of Camouflage is an alcoholic who claims that he and his gang of friends are just one part of a vast camouflaging operation organized by the Party to hide the Soviet Union’s underground military-industrial complex from the CIA’s spy satellites. As they pass their time on the streets and share their alcohol-inspired fantasies, they see the stark reality of the Cold War in Russia in the late seventies. Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage introduces English-speaking readers to a master of the comic first-person narrative.

-- Columbia University Press, the "Russian Library" series
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Russian and Slavic Studies Program
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Email: russhunter@hunter.cuny.edu