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 11, Friday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East), 6:00 pm
Katja Petrowskaja. Maybe Esther. Book talk and Q&A with the author

October 16, Wednesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6:00 pm
Yuz Aleshkovsky. Nikolai Nikolaevich. Book talk and Q&A with the author and translator

October 29, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Tamizdat Project Lab - 2: Lydia Chukovskaia. Sofia Petrovna (1965-1966)

November 5, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 6 pm
Mark Lipovetsky. "Cynicism and Freedom: a Paradox of the Soviet Trickster"

December 3, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Katia Margolis. "Venice Unread"

December 5, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Evgeny Steiner. "Ivan Bodhidharma: The Image of Japan in the Late Soviet Mind and Beyond”

December 10, Tuesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 5:00 pm
Van Goghs (2018; Russia). Film screening and Q&A with the director
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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Katja Petrowskaja. Maybe Esther. Book talk and Q&A with the author. October 11, Friday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (room 706, Hunter East), 6 pm.

An inventive, unique, and extraordinarily moving literary debut that pieces together the fascinating story of one woman’s family across twentieth-century Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. In Maybe Esther, Petrowskaja creates a kind of family tree, charting relatives who had scattered across multiple countries and continents. Her idea blossoms into this striking and highly original work of narrative nonfiction, an account of her search for meaning within the stories of her ancestors. In a series of short meditations, Petrowskaja delves into family legends, introducing a remarkable cast of characters: Judas Stern, her great-uncle, who shot a Germany diplomatic attaché in 1932 and was sentenced to death; her grandfather Semyon, who went underground with a new name during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, forever splitting their branch of the family from the rest; her grandmother Rosa, who ran an orphanage in the Urals for deaf-mute Jewish children; her Ukrainian grandfather Vasily, who disappeared during World War II and reappeared without explanation forty-one years later – and settled back into the family as if he’d never been gone: and her great-grandmother, whose name may have been Esther, who alone remained in Kiev and was killed by the Nazis.

How do you talk about what you can’t know, how do you bring the past to life? To answer this complex question, Petrowskaja visits the scenes of these events, reflecting on a fragmented and traumatized century and bringing to light family figures who threaten to drift into obscurity. A true search for the past reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, and Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, Maybe Esther is a poignant, haunting investigation of the effects of history on the family.  
Katja Petrowskaja was born in 1970 in Kiev. She studied at the University of Tartu in Estonia and received her Ph.D. in Moscow. Since 1999, she has lived and worked as a columnist in Berlin. Maybe Esther is her first book.   

“The kind of reading experience that makes me gasp, laugh, and feel inexpressibly grateful to a person who has decided to tell this story in this way… The book is breaking my heart, because I want to stop and quote from every other paragraph, and I want to give copies to people I love – I want, in other words, to stem the dissolution of storytelling that is the very point of this book. I want it to last forever.”
 
-- Masha Gessen. The New Yorker
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Yuz Aleshkovsky. Nikolai Nikolaevich. Reading and Q&A (in Russian, with English translation). October 16, Wednesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (room 706, Hunter East), 6 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

Our guest author Yuz Aleshkovsky will be joined by his English translator Duffield White, Professor Emeritus of Russian Language and Literature at Wesleyan University.
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Tamizdat Project Lab - 2: Lydia Chukovskaia. Sofia Petrovna. October 29, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm.

Tamizdat Project is a virtual environment that explores to the patters of circulation, first publications and reception of contraband literary manuscripts from the USSR during the Cold War. It is an online archive of documents that deals with how and why masterpieces of Russian literature first appeared abroad long before they could see the light of day in Russia, already during or 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.

This Tamizdat Project Lab will be devoted to Lydia Chukovskaia's novella Sofia Petrovna. A fictional account of the Great Terror (1930s), Sofia Petrovna was written 25 years before it was first published in Paris as a book in 1965 and serialized in New York in 1966. Chukovskaia's manuscript survived Stalinism and WWII only to be rejected by Soviet editors and leak abroad, where it appeared long before it could see the light of day in Russia in 1988. To read Sofia Petrovna in Russia, click here. For the English translation, click here.

Tamizdat Project Lab is limited to 25 participants. It is designed as a hands-on workshop, so please bring your own laptop. We will be working with both archival and print sources on Sofia Petrovna, typing them, translating them into English or Russian, and thus collectively contributing to Tamizdat Project. Please RSVP below and let us know what languages you can work with (NB: knowledge of Russian is NOT required). If you are unable to attend but would still like to volunteer for Tamizdat Project, please click here (or email yakov.klots@hunter.cuny.edu). Looking forward to seeing you!
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Mark Lipovetsky. "Cynicism and Freedom: a Paradox of the Soviet Trickster." November 5, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 6 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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Katia Margolis. "Venice Unread." December 3, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm.

Of all cities, Venice is one of the most over-described and certainly the most over-depicted. Still, the “Venetian text” as a whole (both verbally and pictorially) remains fragmented, since it is mainly read through one’s own cultural optics. Russians search for the Venice of Brodsky; the French follow the Venice of Proust; for the British, John Ruskin still represents the Venice itself, etc. The talk will provide keys to reading Venice as a multilingual text. It will explore, both visually and verbally, the palimpsest nature of its topography, iconic art and architecture, with a special focus on Venetian myths and clichés as cultural metaphors.

Katya Margolis (Venice) is an artist, essayist, translator and illustrator of books of poetry and books for children, including Venetian Notebooks: Joseph Brodsky and Others (2002) and Joseph Brodsky’s Ballad of a Little Tugboat (2010). Her artwork has been featured in numerous solo and joint exhibitions in Europe, Russia and the U.S. In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious NOS Prize for her book Traces on Water (2015). She has also curated annual art exhibitions by children with serious health conditions (in partnership with the “Give Life Foundation”). Ms. Margolis is member of Consiglio Europeo d’Arte and a guest lecturer at the Scuola Internaziomale di Grafica di Venezia.
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Evgeny Steiner. “Ivan Bodhidharma: The Image of Japan in the Late Soviet Mind and Beyond." December 5, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm. Co-hosted by Japanese Studies at Hunter College.

The talk will discuss the cultural image of Japan in the mindset of the Russian intelligentsia of the last two decades of the Soviet era and during later years. It will offer new insights into the psychological type of the intelligentsia and explain, among other things, why in the post-Perestroika era the Soviet intelligentsia lost its leading role in the Russian society. The talk will address and deconstruct the unwritten image of Japan as it existed in the mass consciousness and unofficial oral culture (or, rather in the artistic/intellectual counter-culture) in Russia. It will dwell both on the high moments and pitfalls of the ambiguous strategy of non-belonging professed by the passively dissident intelligentsia as its existential position during the Soviet times.

Evgeny Steiner (Moscow) is an art historian and historian of culture, an expert in Japanese and Russian art and cultural relations. He received his PhD from the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and has taught at various universities in Moscow, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Yokohama, New York, Manchester, and London. Currently, he is a professor at the School of Asian Studies of the Higher School of Economics, Moscow) and professorial research associate at School of Oriental and African Studies (London). He is the author of numerous articles and twelve books in Russian, English, and German.
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Van Goghs (Russia, 2018; RUSS, with ENG subtitles; 103 min). Film screening and Q&A with the script author and director Sergey Livnev. December 10, Thursday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 HE). 5 pm. Co-hosted by Film and Media Studies, Hunter College. In partnership with Russian Film Week New York & Cherry Orchard Foundation. 

Mark Ginzburg is a talented artist who is always depressed. He is 52, but personal and professional success has escaped him. Many years ago, Mark moved from his native Riga to Tel Aviv to get away from his oppressive father, Viktor, who still supports him financially. Victor Ginzburg is a famous conductor. His work is his life. He never cared about Mark's feelings and tried to mold his son in his own image. Their highs and lows turned long ago into a love-hate relationship: more hate than love. Father calls his son by his childhood nickname Birdie, which infuriates the son. Son calls his father Your Majesty, which infuriates the father. After Viktor is diagnosed with a fatal illness, the father and son set off on a difficult journey that leads from hate to love.

Genre: Drama
Duration: 103 min
Director: Sergey Livnev
Writer: Sergey Livnev
Cast: Aleksey Serebryakov, Daniel Olbrychski, Elena Koreneva, Polina Agureeva, Natalya Negoda
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Hunter College, CUNY
Russian and Slavic Studies Program
695 Park Avenue, Suite 1425 HW
New York, NY 10065
Email: russhunter@hunter.cuny.edu