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 20, Wednesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm
"Your Language, My Ear." Bilingual poetry reading by Dmitry Kuzmin, Galina Rymbu, Elena Mikhailik and Leonid Schwab

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

May 14. Tuesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm
"A Journey to the Gulag." Film screening and conversation with Štěpán Černoušek (Czech Republic)
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.
Picture
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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"Your Language My Ear." Bilingual Poetry Reading by Dmitry Kuzmin, Galina Rymbu, Elena Mikhailik, Leonid Schwab and Translators Kevin Platt, Matvei Yankelevich, Anastasia Osipova et al. February 20, Wednesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm.

YOUR LANGUAGE MY EAR is a translation symposium that brings together Russian and American poets, along with American scholars, translators and students of Russian poetry, for intensive translation of contemporary poetry from Russian to English and vice versa at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. Its innovative practice involves virtual collaboration on draft translations via a document cloud, involving multiple participants who each bring their own unique skills to bear—from bilingual scholars, students and translators, to poets who may speak only one language, and everything in between. After some months of this virtual labor, the physical gathering brings everyone together over a number of days to work in small groups to perfect these draft translations, and to present them in readings to the public. The first two rounds of the symposium (in 2011 and 2015) have resulted in multiple publications in books and poetry journals. This year, after a week-long workshop and public readings in Philadelphia and elsewhere, YLME comes to Hunter College and New York City!

POETS' BIOS:

Leonid Schwab was born in Bobruysk, Belarus in 1961. He graduated from Moscow State Technological University and has lived and worked in Orenburg and Vladimir. Since 1990 he has lived in Jerusalem. His work has been published in the journals Zerkalo, Solnechnoe spletenie, Dvoetochie, and in the anthology Vse srazu. He is the author of the poetry collections Poverit’ v botaniku (Believing in Botany, 2005) and Vash Nikolai (Your Nikolai, 2015). Schwab has been recognized with the Andrei Bely Prize (short-listed in 2004, laureate in 2016).

Galina Rymbu is a poetess, literary critic, curatrix, and philosopher from Lviv, Ukraine. Born in 1990 in Omsk, Siberia, Rymbu graduated from the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow and received a Masters in socio-political philosophy from the European University at Saint Petersburg. She is the co-foundress and curatrix of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Poetry Prize for young Russian-language poets. She teaches at the St. Petersburg School of New Film and has organized seminars dedicated to feminist literature and the theory of “F-writing.” She is on the editorial board of the poetry series Novye stikhi (Poriadok Slov Publishing House). Her poetry has been translated into English, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Polish, and Latvian, and has been published in the journals Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Vozdukh, Translit, Snob, n+1, Arc Poetry, The White Review, Berlin Quarterly, Music&Literature, Asymptote, and Powder Keg among others. She has published five books of poetry, including one in English translation. She was the 2017 poet laureate of the Poetry Without Borders festival in Riga, and participates in festivals, conferences, and seminars all over Europe.

Elena Mikhailik was born in Odessa in 1970. She graduated from Odessa State University, where she studied literature. In 1993 she emigrated to Australia and since that time resides in Sydney. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of New South Wales with a dissertation on “Varlam Shalamov: The Poetics of the ‘New Prose.’” She teaches translation at the University of New South Wales as well as at Macquarie University. She is the author of one collection of poetry, Ni snom ni oblakom (Not by dream or cloud, 2008), and her poems have been published in Vozdukh, Volga, Deti Ra, Arion, and other journals. Her scholarly monograph, Nezakonchennaia kometa. Varlam Shalamov: opyt medlennogo chteniia (Incomplete Comet: Varlam Shalamov, an Exercise in Close Reading), on the poetics and rhetoric of the Kolyma Stories, was recently published in Moscow.

Dmitry Kuzmin is a poet, translator, editor and organizer of literary projects. He was born in Moscow in 1968. He has taught at various Russian educational institutions, and in 2014 was visiting professor of Russian poetry at Princeton University. Kuzmin co-authored the first Russian textbook of poetry. He is the founder of the publishing house Argo-Risk (1993), the site Vavilon (1997), and the journal Vozdukh. He has been editor of a number of anthologies, including one of contemporary Russian LGBT poetry. He headed the first almanac of Russian haiku, Triton, and the first journal of LGBT literature in Russia, RISK, and also created the online directory New Map of Literary Russia and the gallery Faces of Russian Literature. He was honored for his organizational work in 2002 with the Andrei Bely Prize. His 2008 collection of poetry and translations was recognized with the Moskovskii schet prize for best debut book of the year. His own poetry has been translated into fourteen languages. Kuzmin has translated into Russian Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Southern Mail, the works of the American poets e.e. cummings, Auden, Charles Reznikoff, C. K. Williams, as well as the works of Ukrainian, French, Belarusian, German, and Polish poets. Due to his opposition to the Russian political regime he has lived since 2014 in Latvia, where he has founded the Literature Without Borders project—an international poetry foundation and residency for translators of poetry. Since 2017, the project has been funding the Poetry Without Borders festival in Riga.

TRANSLATORS' BIOS:

Kevin M.F. Platt, the organizer of Your Language My Ear, is a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. from Amherst College (1989) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1994) and taught at Pomona College before joining the UPenn faculty in 2002. He has been the recipient of grants from IREX, NCEEER, Fulbright-Hays and other programs, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011-12. Dr. Platt works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, history and memory in Russia, Russian lyric poetry, and global post-Soviet Russian cultures. He is the author of Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths (Cornell UP, 2011) and History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006), and Global Russian Cultures (Wisconsin UP, 2018). He has also edited and contributed translations to a number of books of Russian poetry in English translation, most recently Hit Parade: The Orbita Group (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) and Orbita: The Project (Arc, 2018), which is forthcoming this fall. His current projects include a study of contemporary Russian culture in Latvia and a critical historiography of Russia. 

Matvei Yankelevich‘s books include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), Alpha Donut (United Artists), and Boris by the Sea (Octopus). His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook), and (with Eugene Ostashevsky) Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received a National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse, and teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Anastasiya Osipova is a scholar, writer, and translator. She is an editor of Cicada Press, a NYC-based imprint that pursues contemporary politically engaged poetic texts. (Cicada’s most recent publication is a bilingual edition of Pavel Arseniev’s poetry entitled Reported Speech). She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU and is currently teaching at Gallatin, the School of Individualized Study.
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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.

Zara M. Torlone received her B.A. in Classical Philology from Moscow University and M.A., M. Phil, and Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York. Before joining the faculty of Miami University in 2000, she taught at Bard College. Her main research interest is the reception of classics in Russian literature. She is the author of numerous articles, edited volumes and monographs, including Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception, which came out with the Oxford University Press in 2015. The book addresses the role of Vergil's literary legacy in the formation of Russian national and literary identity from the 18th century to the present day.
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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.

TRANSLATORS' BIOS:

Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His recent translations include Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2015 and 2016) and Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018). He is also the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016) and co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).

Irina Mashinski was born in Moscow; she graduated from the Physical Geography Department of Moscow University where she later completed her Ph.D. studies, specializing in Paleoclimatology. She is the author of ten books of poetry and translations (in Russian). Her first English-language collection, The Naked World, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and co-founder (with the late Oleg Woolf) and editor-in-chief of the StoSvet literary project, which includes the Cardinal Points Journal, co-edited with Boris Dralyuk and Robert Chandler and currently published under the auspices of Brown University’s Slavic Studies Department. 

Maria Bloshteyn received her PhD from Toronto’s York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Her main scholarly interests lie in the field of literary and cultural exchange between Russia and the United States. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and the translator of Alexander Galich’s Dress Rehearsal: A Story in Four Acts and Five Chapters (Slavica, 2009) and Anton Chekhov’s The Prank (NYRB Classics, 2015).  Her translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).
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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. Co-sponsored by the Department of Film & Media Studies of Hunter College.

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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"A Journey to the Gulag." Film screening, virtual reality experience, and conversation with Štěpán Černoušek (Czech Republic). May 14, Tuesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm. Co-hosted by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. With the participation of Sergei Parkhomenko.

Around 20 million people went through the horrors of Soviet labor camps. At least 1.6 million of them died. Among the victims of Soviet repression were also people from the U.S.A. and Europe. Currently, with the exception of former Perm-36 project, there are no museums in Russia at places of former Gulag camps from Stalin’s era. However, hundreds of abandoned camps are still hidden away in the Siberian taiga. A small group of enthusiasts visit and document these sites to preserve them virtually and make them accessible to the general public through virtual and augmented reality. Štěpán Černoušek, head of the Gulag Online Virtual Museum and chairman of the Gulag.cz Association (Czech Republic), will speak about the project and its task of documenting the gulags and creating VR and AR experiences for the online museum. The event will include VR and AR demonstrations and a screening of “A Journey to the Gulag,” a documentary based on Černoušek's expeditions to the Gulag (2019, 30 minutes). The event is co-hosted by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a host organization of Černoušek's current Fulbright scholarship in the U.S.
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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