SPRING 2023

Eugene Ostashevsky. "The Feeling Sonnets." A reading and Q&A with the author
February 23, Thursday, 7 pm

Alexander Genis. "The Third Wave: Immigrants from the Soviet Union in New York (1970-1980s)" 
March 9, Thursday, 7 pm 

Marina Temkina. "Poems and Experiences - Immigrant, Gender, and Russian-Jewish." A reading and Q&A with the author 
March 13, Monday, 6 pm

Ukraine's Musical Influence. A Panel Discussion in Honor of Borys Liatoshynsky
March 16, Thursday, 6 pm

Zara Torlone. "Mock Aeneids in Russian and Ukrainian and their Discontents" 
March 20, Monday, 6 pm
Eugene Ostashevsky. The Feeling Sonnets. A reading and conversation with the author. February 23, Thursday, 7 pm. Hunter College, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Room 706, Hunter East Bldg. RSVP required. 

In Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Feeling Sonnets — his fourth collection of poems — words, idioms, sentences, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized in order to convey the experience of living in a land, and a language, apart. The book consists of four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion, whether “we feel the feelings that we call ours.” The second cycle, mainly composed of “daughter sonnets,” describes bringing up children in a foreign country and a foreign language. The third cycle, called “Die Schreibblockade,” German for writer’s block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma, in this case the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944. The fourth cycle, called “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Translator,” is about translingualism and non-correspondence between languages.

Directions (for non-Hunter students or employees): At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID and proof of vaccination to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Alexander Genis, in conversation with Yasha Klots. "The Third Wave: Immigrants from the Soviet Union in New York (1970-1980s)." March 9, Thursday, 7 pm. Hunter College, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Room 706, Hunter East Bldg. RSVP required. 

Join us for a conversation with acclaimed author and  journalist Alexander Genis about the life and works of the literary diaspora from the USSR in New York nearly half a century ago! Raised in Riga, Latvia, Genis emigrated to the U.S. in 1977 at the age of 24, soon after graduating from the Department of Philology of Latvian University. In New York, where he has lived ever since, Genis joined the vibrant cultural scene of the Third Wave of the Russian emigration: his friends and fellow authors included Sergei Dovlatov, Joseph Brodsky, Petr Vail, Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Vitaly Komar, to name but a few. Today, Genis continues to write about the immigrant experience, literature, travel, and cooking, remaining the resonant voice of the Third Wave.    

Directions (for non-Hunter students or employees): At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID and proof of vaccination to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Sergei Dovlatov, Alexander Genis, and Petr Vail at Hunter College. 1979. Photo by Nina Alovert.
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Marina Temkina. "Poems and Experiences - Immigrant, Gender, and Russian-Jewish." A reading and Q&A with the author. March 13, Monday, 6 pm. Hunter College, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Room 706, Hunter East Bldg. In-person, with proof of vaccination. RSVP required. 

Born in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Marina Temkina has lived in New York since 1979. She came to the U.S. with the Third Wave, an exodus of artists, writers, academics, and intellectuals from the former Soviet Union. In New York, she became a poet-artist whose multi-genre work embodies her immigrant experiences. Her books include the poetry collection What Do You Want? (UDP), the artists book Who Is I? (Content), in collaboration with artist Michel Gerard, and several books of poetry in Russian. Temkina has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture among others. In her work as a psychotherapist, she specializes in refugee resettlement, cultural differences, and gender and identity. Please join us for a reading by Marina Temkina and a conversation with the author about her years as an immigrant in New York of the 1970-1980s. 

Directions (for non-Hunter students or employees): At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID and proof of vaccination to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Photo by Mikhail Torich
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Ukraine's Musical Influence. A Panel Discussion in Honor of Borys Liatoshynsky, moderated by Leah Batstone. March 16, Thursday, 6 pm. Hunter College, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Room 706, Hunter East Bldg. RSVP required. Co-hosted by the Department of Music. The event is part of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in NYC. 

Marking the 55th anniversary of Ukrainian composer Borys Liatoshynsky's death, join us for an exploration of the concept of influence in the field of music studies, including how influence contributes to national musical identity, canon formation, and musical exchange across borders. Joy Calico (Vanderbilt University), Peter Schmelz (Arizona State University) and Liza Sirenko (Graduate Center, CUNY) will explore these ideas with respect to Liatoshynsky, Ukraine, and beyond.

Peter J. Schmelz is Professor of Musicology at Arizona State University, Tempe. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, his writing has received awards from ASCAP and from the American Musicological Society. His most recent book is Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the late USSR (Oxford, 2021). Among other ongoing projects, Professor Schmelz is currently co-editing an introduction to Ukrainian music for Indiana University Press.

Joy H. Calico is University Distinguished Professor of Musicology and German Studies and Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Music at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She has written extensively about Bertolt Brecht, opera in the 20th and 21st centuries, and Arnold Schoenberg. Her award-winning monograph Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (California, 2014) was just published in Italian translation (Il Saggiatore, 2023).

Liza Sirenko is a music theorist, critic, and current Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She studies contemporary instrumental music and her current research focuses on North American approaches to post-tonal music analysis. She is a co-founder and editor of the Ukrainian classical music website The Claquers, where she discovers music from abroad for Ukrainian audience and explores Ukrainian classical music for English-speaking readers. She is  the former PR Director for the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra and the independent Liatoshynsky Club initiative. 

Leah Batstone (University of Vienna and Hunter College) is a musicologist working at the intersections of art music, politics, and philosophy in Central and Eastern Europe. She is currently working on her second monograph concerning Ukrainian musical modernism with the support of a REWIRE postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vienna. From 2018-2021, she spent three wonderful years as an instructor in the Department of Music at Hunter College and will be returning to teach a seminar on empires and their musics in summer of 2023. She is the creative director of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID and proof of vaccination to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Zara Torlone. "Mock Aeneids in Russian and Ukrainian and their Discontents." March 20, Monday, 6 pm. Hunter College, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, Room 706, Hunter East Bldg. In-person, with proof of vaccination. RSVP required. 

This talk will introduce the audience to two mock versions of Vergil’s Roman national epic The Aeneid. One was written in Russian by Nikolai Osipov and another by a Ukrainian author Ivan Kotliarevsky. Both poems contributed to the shaping of their cultures’ literary canons and identities. But while Osipov’s poem sunk into oblivion, Kotliarevsky’s oeuvre became the cornerstone of Ukrainian literary vernacular. The talk will offer some insights as to why these poems had such different receptions in posterity.

Zara Martirosova Torlone is a Professor in the Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies and a member of the Core Faculty at the Havighurst Center for Russian in Post-Soviet Studies. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (2009), Latin Love Poetry (co-authored, 2014), and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (2015). She has also authored articles on Roman poetry and novel, Russian reception of antiquity, Roman games, and textual criticism. Her most recent publications are a co-edited volume on Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe, to which she also contributed (2017), and a co-edited volume Virgil’s Translators, also with her own contribution (2018). She is currently working on a monograph Shapes of Exile: Ovid in Russia, which will be published by Oxford University Press. Her article on mock Aeneids in Russia and Ukraine will be coming out in 2023 in Modern Language journal.

Directions (for non-Hunter students or employees): At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID and proof of vaccination to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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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