ONGOING FALL 2024
Russian Conversation Hour (Русский разговорный час). Join us for tea, cookies, conversation, and fun activities!
Вы говорите по-русски? Хотите говорить ещё лучше? Приходите на Русский разговорный час!
Join our Russian Conversation Hour to embark on a journey of discovering Russian language and culture of Russian-speaking countries:
- Thematic Meetings: We host conversational sessions led by USC faculty on a variety of cultural topics. Each meeting brings something unique to the table.
- Connect and Learn: Engage in our activities to expand your language skills, immerse yourself in Russian-speaking cultures, and make new friends.
- All level friendly: We welcome all, from beginners to advanced speakers, as well as heritage speakers for discussions of a wide range of topics tailored so that everyone can get engaged.
When? Mondays at 5:00pm
Where? Taper Hall 260
До скорой встречи! Вопросы? Пишите Саше Пчелинцевой pchelint@usc.edu
October 14, 2024 Book Talk
Professor Lisa Kerschenbaum discusses her new book Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists. Oct. 14, 4pm-6pm, 309K Taper Hall. Co-sponsored by Slavic and the Max Kade Institute
October 28, 2024 Lecture
Talk by Anton Dolin, former editor-in-chief of Искусство кино and one of Russia’s most prominent film experts. He has recently published a new book on contemporary Russian cinema titled Плохие русские. Leavy Library 16,12pm-2pm.
October 29, 2024 Lecture
VSRI Zoom talk by Weronika Malek-Lubowski (USC Art History PhD candidate), “Between Moscow and Paris: Museum of Art in Łódź and the Transnational Avant-Garde Network.” RSVP to vsri@usc.edu to get the Zoom link.
November 5, 2024 Reading & Discussion
Ukrainian professor, poet, and human rights activist Ostap Slyvynsky will read from his new Ukrainian Dictionary of War, and Steve Swerdlow and Colleen McQuillen will conduct an interview with him. 3:30pm-4:50pm. Doheny Memorial Library 240.
February 28, 2025 Lecture
Michal Markowski (University of Illinois at Chicago), “Russian Terror, Polish Novel. Dostoevsky, Brzozowski, and the Politics of Modern Life.” Taper 309K, 2:00pm.
Abstract:
Stanisław Brzozowski, Polish Modernist philosopher, literary critic, and writer (1878-1911), published 1908 a two-volume novel, Płomienie (Flames), immediately stirring controversies in the literary circles. Being a fictionalized account of the life of Michał Kaniowski, a Polish gentry man who “betrayed” a national cause and joined a Russian terrorist group to plot assassinations of the Tzar and his entourage, the novel was considered a Polish delayed response to Dostoevsky’s Demons. Although in both books, the factual background was built upon the movement of Narodnaya Volya (Peoples’ Will) and its leader Nechaev, Brzozowski’s main point was not a caricature of provincial failed attempts at undermining the tzarist power but a paradigmatic Modern political oscillation between the singular (belonging to a nation) and the universal (claiming the transnational revolutionary cause), which, after the 1905 revolution, defined political life across Eastern Europe. Publishing Płomienie in Lviv (under Austrian jurisdiction), Brzozowski avoided Russian censorship but did not avoid an ongoing discussion on what it meant to be a Modern Pole in times of political oppression and social upheaval. Being an original philosopher of labor, committed to the international workers’ strive for emancipation as well as to the proto-existentialist ideology of life, Brzozowski tried to put on display in the novel several issues at the same time: his longtime fascination with Russian culture; his strong criticism of Polish catholic tradition; his deep commitment to the lost causes of poverty and injustice, and, last but not least, a morbid obsession with political power. In all these aspects, he was a clear outsider among Polish intellectuals, so it did not come as a surprise that just after the novel was published, Brzozowski was falsely accused of collaborating with the tzarist secret police—the heaviest possible charge to be made against a Polish intellectual. The lecture embarks on this intricate knot of politics, existence, and economics in the Modernist development of Polish self-reflection and self-definition, which, as the case of Brzozowski proved clearly, was in a constant, although not universally accepted, exchange with the political, social, and literary situation in Russia.
March 5, 2025 Creative Workshops
Voices of Freedom, Voices of War in Ukraine: Creative Workshops
Essayist Sasha Dovzhyk will lead a critical reading workshop; Artist Marina Malyarenko will lead a hands-on workshop to make postcards using the traditional Ukrainian folk painting technique Petrykivka; Poet Iryna Starovoyt will lead a letter-writing workshop. Doheny Library 240, 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
March 5, 2025 Readings & Conversations
Voices of Freedom, Voices of War in Ukraine: Readings and Conversations. Join us for a stirring conversation about the arts in contemporary Ukraine—and about displacement, loss, and cultural resilience in times of war. Lviv-based essayist Sasha Dovzhyk, Halych-born and Santa Monica–based artist Marina Malyarenko, Lviv-based poet and author of A Field of Foundlings Iryna Starovoyt, and UCSD professor Amelia Glaser (moderator) will gather to discuss how Ukrainian artists and writers have helped shape independent, multicultural national identities, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Maidan protests of 2013–14, and through Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 and full-scale war beginning in 2022. Doheny Library 240, 7:00pm.
March 28-29, 2025 Scholarly Conference
Russian Afterlives of the Early Modern
What is an afterlife? Flickering elusively or persisting durably across centuries and geographic borders, an idea or a cultural artefact takes on different meanings across time. These inflections are tied to hermeneutic practices and the contexts in which they emerge, as well as vagaries of taste, politics, and human folly. Understood and manifested variously as influence, legacy, intertext, citation, or copy, an afterlife can have material and conceptual consequences that haunt or invigorate readers and writers. Inextricably tied to the passage of time, an afterlife is a resurgence, rediscovery, or reconstruction of cultural patrimony, which can trigger excitement, confusion, or resistance.
“Russian Afterlives of the Early Modern” aims to stir reflection on how practices of re-reading, re-writing, and otherwise making meaning anew–commonly grouped under the rubric of reception studies–have operated in Russophone culture. While scholars frequently allude to Derrida’s Spectre of Marx to speak of Soviet-era traumas that haunt post-Soviet cultural production, a constructive framework for analysing the long tail of the early modern period remains under-theorized.
We invite contributions that engage with the modern Russian afterlives of eastern Slavic culture from the 16th-18th centuries. We offer the following questions to stimulate reflection:
How has historical periodization taken shape in Russian cultural memory and in the field of Slavic Studies? Does it even make sense to apply the standard European periodization of “the early modern period” to the Slavic world, where the Middle Ages are often assumed to have ended at the turn of the eighteenth century?
Why have Russians looked back to the early modern period, and what have they found there?
How has the early modern period offered later writers, artists, thinkers, and politicians a lens through which to articulate or re-examine their own contemporary realities?
How has the pre-national character of the period been recognized?
How did the early modern period become marginalized or erased from cultural memory and what consequences has this had?
Have interpretative approaches to eastern Slavic early modern culture differed between anglophone and russophone scholars?
In addition to appropriations or productive reinterpretations of the early modern, have there been conscious (or subconscious) and outright rejections of certain cultural traits of the early modern?
Have non-verbal forms of early modern cultural expression such as music and art been overlooked in favour of textual documents?
What place does reception studies occupy in the field of Slavic? How can its methodological perspective help us to rethink standard narratives about the Russian cultural tradition?
Photos from Recent Events
