FALL 2023

Anna Starobinets and Katherine E. Young. Look at Him. A bilingual reading and Q&A
September 18, 6 pm

Aleksandra Kamińska. "Queer Publishing as Protest: DIY Culture in Today's Poland" 
October 5, 7 pm

Tomas Venclova. Poetry reading and Q&A 
​October 10, 7 pm

Oksana Vasyakina's Wound. Translation reading and Q&A with Elina Alter 
October 16, 7 pm

Elena Kostyuchenko. I Love Russia. Reporting from a Lost Country. Book talk and Q&A with the author 
October 30, 7 pm

Hey! Teachers! A Film Screening and Q&A with the director Yulia Vishnevets 
November 2, 7 pm

The Dmitriev Affair. Film Screening and Q&A with the director Jessica Gorter 
November 15, 7 pm

Vladimir Paperny. "War and Exhibitions: How Nikita Khrushchev Wanted to Fool Richard Nixon in 1959" 
November 20, 7 pm
Anna Starobinets and Katherine E. Young. Look at Him. A reading and Q&A with the author and translator. Monday, September 18, 6 pm. Chanin Language Center, room B126 Hunter West Building. Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Russian writer in exile Anna Starobinets and her translator Katherine E. Young will read and discuss the memoir Look at Him. A finalist for the 2018 National Bestseller Prize, Look at Him ignited a firestorm in Russia, prompting both high praise and severe condemnation for the author’s willingness to discuss long-taboo issues of women’s agency over their own bodies. Beautiful, darkly humorous, and deeply moving, Look at Him explores moral, ethical, and quintessentially human issues that resonate for families in the world beyond Russia, as well. 

Journalist, scriptwriter, and novelist Anna Starobinets has been called “Russia’s Queen of Horror.” She has published novels, short stories, and children's books, and describes herself as writing "horror and supernatural fiction for adults, and also fairy and detective stories for children." Poet and translator Katherine E. Young has translated prose from Russia and Azerbaijan and poetry from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Young served as the inaugural poet laureate for Arlington, Virginia.

Directions: at the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator one floor down, turn around and look for Chanin Language Center. Room B126 is to your right through the door and up the stairs.
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Aleksandra Kamińska. "Queer Publishing as Protest: DIY Culture in Today's Poland." Moderated by Monika Zaleska. Thursday, October 5. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, room 706 Hunter East Building. Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

Please join us for a conversation with Aleksandra Kamińska of Warsaw University and co-founder of the zine Girls and Queers To The Front. Aleksandra will discuss her zine and independent publishing venture with Monika Zaleska, Lecturer in Polish Literature at Hunter College. We will discuss the joys and struggles of publishing queer and feminist literature in the current Polish political climate and the practice of DIY culture — from pop-up events to DJing to publishing new and exciting voices in today's Poland.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID 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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Tomas Venclova. Poetry reading and Q&A. Tuesday, October 10. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, room 706 Hunter East Building. Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, 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 from the Soviet Union in 1977, Venclova returned to his native Lithuania and is now living in Vilnius. He will read his poems in the original Lithuanian, as well as in the English and Russian translations, and reflect, in particular, on what it means for an East European intellectual to be caught up in the historical and political turbulence of the Soviet era, as well as today. 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID 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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Oksana Vasyakina's Wound. Translation reading and Q&A with Elina Alter. Monday, October 16. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, room 706 Hunter East Building. Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

Writer and educator Oksana Vasyakina (joining via Zoom) and translator Elina Alter will read from and discuss WOUND, Vasyakina’s acclaimed first novel. A sensation when it was published in Russia in 2021, WOUND follows a young woman growing up in Siberia and Moscow, gradually unfolding into a consideration of grief, family, the lives of women, lesbian sexuality, and the uses of art. In her introduction to the original edition, Polina Barskova calls the book “Acutely necessary. WOUND is a bold, human, powerful meditation on how a language of love and death takes shape.”

Elina Alter is a writer and the translator of Oksana Vasyakina's Wound. Her translation of Alla Gorbunova's It's the End of the World, My Love was published by Deep Vellum in 2023, and a translation of a short story collection by Gorbunova is forthcoming. She is the editor of Circumference, a journal of translation and international culture.
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Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID 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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Elena Kostyuchenko. I Love Russia. Reporting from a Lost Country. Book talk and Q&A with the author. Monday, October 30. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East Building). Free and open to the public. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. RSVP required.

I Love Russia. Reporting from a Lost Country is Elena Kostyuchenko’s unrelenting attempt to document her country as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself. Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it. The result is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a young woman who refuses to be silenced. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia’s last free press, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was her mission to ensure that Russians witnessed the horrors Putin was committing in their name. She filed her pieces knowing that should she return home, she would likely be prosecutedand sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. Yet, driven by the conviction that the greatest formof love and patriotism is criticism, she continues to write. 

I Love Russia stitches together reportage from the past fifteen years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last work from her homeland that she’ll publish for a long time—perhaps ever. It exposes the inner workings of an entire nation as it descends into fascism and, inevitably, war.

Elena Kostyuchenko was born in Yaroslavl, Russia in 1987. She began working as a journalist when she was fourteen, and spent seventeen years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last major independent newspaper until it was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting from Ukraine. She is the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Gerd Bucerius Award, and the Paul Klebnikov Prize.
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Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID 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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Hey! Teachers! Film Screening and Q&A with the author Julia Vishnevets. November 2, 7 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, 706 Hunter East Building. Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

Two young intellectuals, Katya and Vassya, come to a small industrial town to work as teachers. They want to change the system of education and the social situation in difficult regions. The school is a closed conservative world, where obedience and discipline are of the highest value. Young teachers discover that nationalism, sexism and homophobia are typical for their new environment. Children see the school as a prison and are completely indifferent to any new ideas. During one school year we observe attempts of our protagonists to bring new practices into the system. Young teachers try to speak with children about feminism, human rights and Russian politics, but the system pushes them out, and a comedy turns into a drama.
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Yulia Vishnevets is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and director of over 20 non-fiction films. She has worked as a reporter, translator and photographer in various media. Between 2013-2014 she reported for Deutsche Welle in Germany. Since 2015 she has been staff current affairs documentary maker for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Current Time TV channel in Russia. Her documentary feature Hey! Teachers! received 2020 Best Documentary Feature National Award in Russia; special jury prize at Krakow film festival and Golden Apricot film festival in Yerevan; was the first runner-up at HKIDF in Hong Kong and part of the Best of Fests program in the IDFA festival. Her short films were recognized by professional nominations and awards in Russia and abroad. In September 2022 she was detained while trying to film an anti-military demonstration in Russia, spent 5 days in prison in a North Caucasian village and had to leave the country being at risk of criminal prosecution. She now lives in Georgia. 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID 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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The Dmitriev Affair (2023 | Netherlands | 96 min). Film screening and Q&A with the director Jessica Gorter. November 15, 7 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center, 706 Hunter East Building. Free and open to the public. RSVP required. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. 

The riveting story of Yuri Dmitriev is a tale of one man’s fight against the erasure of history by the Russian state. Deep inside the Russian forests, against the wishes of the authorities, 60-year-old Yuri Dmitriev searches for mass graves from the era of Stalin’s terror against his own people – until one day he is arrested and sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony. Following Yuri closely, the film paints a shocking picture of the way the Russian state rewrites history and treats its citizens.

Yuri Dmitriev exhumes what the Russian rulers would rather forget. After years of searching the pine forests of Karelia in northwestern Russia, he discovers a mass grave containing thousands of people who were secretly executed during Stalin’s “Great Terror” of 1937. It is not the Russian government but Yuri Dmitriev who tracks down their identities in the archives and organizes commemorations for their next of kin. Thanks to his efforts, they finally find out what happened to their lost relatives. Having himself been left at a maternity clinic as a baby, he is a man on a mission: "Every human being has the right to know where they came from and where their family lies buried."

While abroad there is increasing recognition for this “archaeologist of terror,” in Russia Dmitriev is discredited as someone collaborating with the West. Then he is arrested, on basis of a fabricated charge. Tragically accurate Dmitriev predicts his own future and that of his country.

Jessica Gorter is a Dutch documentary filmmaker. She studied directing and editing at the Dutch Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. Her films are screened worldwide at film festivals, theatrically released and broadcasted internationally. Gorter made her breakthrough with 900 Days (2011) about the myth and reality of the Leningrad blockade. The film won a.o. the IDFA Award for Best Dutch Documentary, the Prix Interreligieux at Visions du Réel and the special jury prize at ArtDocFest in Moscow. In 2014 Jessica received the prestigious Documentary Award from the Dutch Prince Bernhard Cultural Fund for her work. In her other feature-length documentary The Red Soul (2017), the director investigated why Stalin is still seen as a hero by so many Russians. With her latest documentary The Dmitriev Affair (2023) Gorter continues the theme of the films she has been making in Russia since the 1990s: laying bare the consequences for individual lives of the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID 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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Vladimir Paperny. "War and Exhibitions: How Nikita Khrushchev Wanted to Fool Richard Nixon at the 1959 Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow, and What Came out of It." Monday, November 20. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East Building). Free and open to the public. Co-hosted by Tamizdat Project. RSVP required.

In 1834, Prussian general and war theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously said: "War is the continuation of politics by other means." In 2015, architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen paraphrased von Clausewitz: "Exhibitions are a continuation of war by other means". Among multiple examples of confrontations at international exhibitions are the Soviet and German pavilions at the 1937 Paris Expo and the 1959 exhibition exchange between the USSR and the USA.

Vladimir Paperny graduated from the Stroganov Art Academy in Moscow with MA in Design. He received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the Russian State University for the Humanities. His PhD thesis Architecture in the Age of Stalin. Culture Two was later published in Russian, English, Czech, and Italian. The French edition is scheduled for next year. Since moving to the US in 1981, Dr. Paperny was visiting professor and lecturer at USC, UCLA, Bristol University, UK, and other American and European universities. He received grants and stayed at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1984 and 2008. In addition to his teaching and writing (both academic and fiction), Dr. Paperny continues his work as designer and filmmaker.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID 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: [email protected]