SPRING 2020

February 6, Thursday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm
Lev Rubinstein. Poetry reading (in Russian, with ENG translation)

February 20, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Tamizdat Project Lab 3. The fiction of Yuli Daniel (aka. Nikolai Arzhak)

February 28 - March 1. CUNY Graduate Center, Hunter College, and the Ukrainian Museum
Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival

March 3, Tuesday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Pavel Chepyzhov. "Georgian Book Design in the 1920-1930s"

March 5, Thursday. B126 (Chanin Language Center). 5:30 pm
Vadim Bass. "Designs of Soviet War Monuments" (1941-1945)"

March 13, Friday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm CANCELLED due to COVID-19
Polina Barskova and Valzhyna Mort. Poetry reading (in Russian with ENG translation)

March 17, Tuesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (Room 706, Hunter East). 6 pm CANCELLED due to COVID-19
Philip Ewell. "Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Politics and Poetry in Contemporary Russian Rap"

May 26, Tuesday. 11 am (EDT). Online
Tamizdat Project Lab: Joseph Brodsky Abroad before Emigration
Lev Rubinstein. Poetry reading (in Russian, with ENG translation). February 6, Thursday, 6 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 HE). C0-hosted by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Born in 1947, Lev Rubinstein was a major figure of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. While working as a librarian, he began using catalogue cards to write sequential texts. He described his “note-card poems” as a “hybrid genre” that “slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them.” His work was circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the “unofficial” art scene of the sixties and seventies, finding wide publication only after the late 1980s. Now among Russia’s most well-known living poets, Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes cultural criticism for independent media. His books in English translation include Here I Am (Glas, 2001), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2004), Thirty-Five New Pages (UDP, 2011), and Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2014), in which his note-card poems appear in their entirety.

Lev Rubinstein will be joined by the poet, translator and publisher Matvei Yankelevich, who will read the English translations. Yankelevich was born in Moscow and moved to the United States at age four. He is author of several books of poetry and prose, as well as translations from Russian into English, including Boris by the Sea (2009), Writing in the Margin (2001), The Present Work (2006), Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (2007). His translations have also appeared in Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (2006), Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (2008), and Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think (2013). Yankelevich is a cofounder and co-executive director of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he edits books and curates the Eastern European Poets Series. He has taught courses in translation, publishing, and Russian literature at Columbia University, Colorado College, Hunter College, Wesleyan University, and Bard College. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Tamizdat Project Lab 3. The Fiction of Yuli Daniel (aka. Nikolai Arzhak). February 20, Thursday. B16 (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 in the West 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 the prose fiction of Yuli Daniel, whose writings appeared abroad since 1962 under the pseudonym Nikolai Arzhak. In September, 1965, Daniel was arrested in Moscow together with his fellow writer Andrei Sinyavsky (aka. Abram Terts) and sentenced to 5 years of hard labor for publishing his "slanderous" works abroad, in tamizdat. His prose, including the novellas This Is Moscow Speaking, Hands, Redemption, and A Man from MINAP, combines descriptions of everyday life in post-Stalin Russia with elements of the fantastic, A book of his verses written in prison was published in Amsterdam in 1971.

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 such as reviews, diaries and editorial correspondence, typing and 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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UKRAINIAN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL. February 28 - March 1. CUNY Graduate Center, Hunter College, The Ukrainian Museum. Organized by Leah Batstone (Department of Music, Hunter College).

The Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival will explore the role of music in contemporary Ukrainian culture and politics through lively conversation and performance. Hosted by the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, Hunter College, and the Ukrainian Museum, the Festival will provide space to both hear today’s most exciting Ukrainian new music and to contextualize its place within a broader scope of history and society. Each event held during the festival will pair thought-provoking discussions led by distinguished scholars of Ukrainian history and culture with a performance of works by Ukraine’s leading living composers, surveying topics such as revolution and political upheaval, music education in Ukraine, and modern Ukrainian history. For more information and detailed schedule, please visit the UCMFNYC website. All festival events are free and open to the public!

SCHEDULE and LOCATIONS:

Date: Friday, February 28, 2020
Location: Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center | 365 Fifth Avenue | New York, NY 10016
Theme: 50 Years of Ukrainian Culture: Music, Literature and Art

5PM: Roundtable discussion featuring Dr. Mark Andryczyk of Columbia University, who will discuss Ukraine’s literary development since the late Soviet period; Dr. Olena Martynyuk of Columbia University, who will provide an overview of visual arts culture; and Oksana Nesterenko of SUNY Stony Brook, who  will compare music climate in Ukraine before and after the Declaration of Independence (1991), with a particular focus on spiritual themes in the music of the most prominent composers of the 1960s generation.

6:30PM: A concert of works by some of Ukraine’s most well-established composers, including Myroslav Skoryk’s Three Extravagant Dances, Ihor Shcherbakov’s Canzone for Two Violins, Virko Baley’s Journey after Loves, Yevhen Stankovych’s Kupala Songs, and Hanna Havrylet’s A Red Sun after Oleksander Oles.

Date: Saturday, February 29, 2020
Location: Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College, CUNY | 695 Park Avenue | New York, NY 10065
Theme: Music and Revolution in Ukraine

4PM: Dr. Inessa Bazayev of Louisiana State University will discuss the music of Nikolai Roslavets and his contributions to the development of a Soviet avant-garde aesthetic. Current Guggenheim Fellow Dr. Peter Schmelz of Arizona State University will discuss one of Ukraine’s most important living composers, Valentyn Sylvestrov. Dr. Leah Batstone of Hunter College, CUNY will explore the changing landscape of music in Ukraine following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.

6PM: A concert of works including Nikolai Roslavet’s Meditation, Valentyn Sylvestrov’s Songs for Vasyl Slipak and Kitsch Music, Ostap Manulyak’s Oracle, Svyatoslav Lunyov’s Dances of New Russians, and Ivan Taranenko’s Global Bells, among many others.

A post-concert reception, featuring the music of Ukrainian jazz pianist Fima Chupakhin, will be held at the Ukrainian Institute of America.

Date: Sunday, March 1, 2020
Location: Ukrainian Museum | 222 East 6th Street | New York, NY 10003
Theme: Composers’ Roundtable

2PM: Roundtable discussion moderated by Ludmila Yurina, who will start the conversation with a short history of approaches to the education of contemporary composers in Ukraine. Composers on the panel include Anna Korsun, Svyatoslav Lunyov and legendary Ukrainian composer, Leonid Hrabovsky.

3PM: Concert featuring Leonid Hrabovsky’s Trio for Violin, Bass, and Piano, Anna Korsun’s Wehmut, Svyatoslav Lunyov’s Zehn Stücke, and Ludmila Yurina’s Silicon Interferences, amongst other works by their students and peers.
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Pavel Chepyzhov. "Georgian Book Design in the 1920-1930s." March 3, Tuesday. B16 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm.

“Enhanced by biographies, comprehensive bibliography, and numerous illustrations, New Georgian Book Design, 1920s-30s is a veritable encyclopedia of Georgian Modernism [and an] extraordinary contribution to the history of the international avant-garde. [The authors’] passionate dedication and faultless scholarship have guided an archaeological expedition which has brought to light a verbal and visual legacy long umbrageous, if not, forgotten – and which, undoubtedly, will impact the conventional historiography of 20th-century European art” (John E. Bowlt, University of Southern California, Los Angeles).

Pavel Chepyzhov is the founder and sole owner of Bookvica, with rare antiquarian bookshops in Tbilisi and Moscow. He holds a Master’s degree in Book History from the Moscow Sate University for Printing Arts and has participated in over 30 antiquarian book fairs around the world, including those in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Frankfurt. Over the course of several years, Chepyzhov has assembled a collection of Georgian-language constructivist book editions from the 1920s, which were been featured at the “Georgian Avant-Garde” exhibition in Pushkin State Museum of Printing Arts in Moscow. The album New Georgian Book Design (2018; co-edited by art historian Qeti Kintsurashvili) serves as the catalogue of the collection. Chepyzhov is a member of the executive committee of International League of Antiquarian Booksellers. Since 2018, he has also been managing the Russian-language bookshop in San Francisco called Globus Books.
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Vadim Bass. "Designs of Soviet War Monuments (1941-1945): Transformation of the Memorial Genre, the Models, the Visual Language and Its Sources." March 5, Thursday. B16 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30 pm.

In the first half of the 1940s, Soviet architects produced numerous design drawings for war monuments. Some of these designs were strange and unorthodox. They differed dramatically from architectural mainstream of the 1930s, as well as from memorials of the postwar period. From the very beginning of the German-Soviet War, artists started experimenting, trying to invent a new and unconventional language for the expression of the enormous tragedy they witnessed, to stretch the limits of memorial genre and “speak out.” On the one hand, they employed the rhetorical tools dating back to the traditionalist poetics of the heroic monuments of the past. On the other hand, memorials were a unique part of Soviet architecture, demonstrating inheritance from the post-revolutionary modernism even during the period of anti-modernist reaction: it was modernists who instrumentalized psychology and psychophysiology, and in the memorial field, these techniques of provoking the viewer’s emotional response stayed legitimate. The shock of the war resulted in projects that demonstrated a paradoxical “liberation” of Soviet architects. The lecture examines the transformation of the memorial genre in the projects of the WWII period, the sources of the memorial language that was both innovative and traditional at the same time, and the mechanisms of psychological manipulation developed by the designers.

Vadim Bass is an historian of architecture and Associate Professor at the European University in St Petersburg, Department of Art History. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the State Russian Museum (2006) and is the author of St. Petersburg Neoclassical Architecture of the 1900s to 1910s, as Reflected in the Mirror of Architectural Competitions: Word and Form (St Petersburg, 2010, in Russian). He has also published over 20 academic articles and conference papers, as well as 30 historical and critical essays in various magazines, including The New Literary Observer, Hermitage Magazine, Fashion Theory, Sociology of Power, STEPS, Autoportret, among others. In 2013 and 2019, he was a visiting professor at the Venice International University. His special interests are memorial architecture and the commemoration of the Siege of Leningrad, and classical tradition in twentieth-century architecture.
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Polina Barskova. Air Raid. Poetry reading (in Russian with English translations by Valzhyna Mort). March 13, Friday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 HE), 6 pm. CANCELLED due to COVID-19

Polina Barskova began writing poetry at the age of eight and published her first book in 1991. She left Russia at twenty to pursue a Ph.D. in Russian Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, having already earned a degree and become an accomplished poet in her native St. Petersburg. Three books of Barskova’s poetry have been translated into English (This Lamentable City, Tupelo Press, 2010), The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Melville House, 2011), and Relocations (Zephyr Press, 2015). A professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College, Barskova works on the cultural representation of the Siege of Leningrad and is the author of Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (Northern Illinois UP, 2017). She has also edited Written in the Dark: Five Poets in the Siege of Leningrad (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), an anthology of verses written during the siege that remained unknown for decades. Barskova lives in Amherst, MA, and teaches at Hampshire College. In 2015, she received Andrey Bely Prize for her book of prose Living Pictures. Her play under the same title has been staged at Moscow Theatre of Nations. She is now working with Valzhyna Mort on a new book of her poetry in English, Air Raid.

Poet and translator Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus, and made her American debut in 2008 with Factory of Tears, followed in 2011 by Collected Body. She is the editor of two poetry anthologies and the recipient of the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry, the Amy Clamitt Fellowship, the Gulf Coast Journal Prize in Translation, as well as a number of European fellowships and prizes. Her third book of poetry, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is coming out in 2020 from FSG. For her work on Polina Barskova's collection, Air Raid, Mort has been recently awarded a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Ithaca, NY, and teaches at Cornell University.
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Philip Ewell. "Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Politics and Poetry in Contemporary Russian Rap." March 17, Tuesday. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 HE). 6 pm.  CANCELLED due to COVID-19

The spoken word has always held a special place in the hearts of Russians. From Alexander Pushkin’s revolutionary writings, which inspired generations of Russian playwrights and librettists, to poetry recitations by Evgeny Evtushenko, to Russian bards like Vladimir Vysotsky, Russians love oral literary forms. This vibrant tradition lives today in the genre of Russian rap.  Artists such as Husky, Noize MC, Oxxxymiron, Timati, and Vasya Oblomov are skilled wordsmiths who advance not just the literary form of poetry, but also political and cultural messages. In this talk I explore this genre from its beginnings to contemporary forms, and I discuss issues of censorship in the current oppressive Russian political climate in which an artist’s career can hinge on taking a friendly or antagonistic stance toward government.

Philip Ewell is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His specialties include Russian music and music theory, Russian opera, critical-race studies, and rap and hiphop music. He has writings published in various academic music journals, which can be accessed at his website, philipewell.com. He is also active as a cellist specializing in contemporary and non-classical music.
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Tamizdat Project Lab. "Joseph Brodsky Abroad before Emigration." May 26, Tuesday, 11 am (EDT). ONLINE

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), you are cordially invited to participate in our next Tamizdat Project Lab, which will be devoted to his first two books of poetry, Stikhotvoreniia i Poemy (Poems and Long Poems, 1965) and Ostanovka v Pustyne (A Halt in the Desert, 1970), published in the U.S., respectively, fifty-five and fifty years ago. While the first publication was unauthorized and appeared abroad in the wake of Brodsky’s infamous show trial in Leningrad “without the author’s knowledge or consent,” the second volume was compiled by the author but still produced mixed reaction. As part of the workshop, we will reconstruct the history of Brodsky’s first publications and their reception in tamizdat prior to the poet’s arrival in the U.S. in 1972.

Apart from working with rare archival sources, many of which still remain unpublished, we will focus on the reception of Brodsky abroad through the lens of the oldest Russian émigré newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo (1910-2010), now available as a searchable database through the New York Public Library. We will be joined by Bogdan Horbal, the Slavic Librarian at NYPL and enthusiast of Tamizdat Project, who will present the NRS database and other periodicals accessible remotely with the NYPL library card. Those without access to the database will, of course, still be able to participate by working with other sources.     

To sign up for NYPL and get your card electronically, please click on the following link. You will be asked to enter a New York State address.
 
The workshop will be online. RSVP is required. Please mention if you have access to the NYPL databases. You will receive the Zoom link upon registration.     

Tamizdat Project Lab is limited to 25 participants. It is designed as a workshop, so please be ready to use your own computer. We will be working with both archival and print sources such as reviews, diaries and editorial correspondence, typing and translating them into English or Russian, and thus collectively contributing to the project. Please let us know what other 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 your application to tamizdatproject@gmail.com.

Tamizdat Project is a virtual environment that explores to the patters of circulation, first publications and reception of contraband literary manuscripts from the former USSR in the West 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.
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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