Please join the American Center in Moscow for the Fall 2024 Culture Connection series, “Russian Culture: А Bridge to the Next Era.” This 6-part online speaker series takes us back 100 years to explore how Russian art, culture and literature provided continuity to the newly-forming Soviet society, even as it evolved into new forms and expressions. Through this lens we can view the cultural foundations of Russian identity and understand how Russians rely on culture to accompany them through changing times.

This series invites American professors to share their findings and insights from their work related to Russian culture and give us insights into how American students respond. We will see how American attitudes and tastes have evolved and changed over the years and understand what aspects of Russian culture are most interesting to Americans.

About the Moderator and Series Curator, Michael Beckelhimer: 

Michael Beckelhimer is a graduate of Russian studies programs at American University and Harvard. He lived in Moscow and Tallinn before, during, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, and traveled there often to shoot his documentary film “Pushkin Is Our Everything.” He lives in Alexandria, VA, where he is working on a documentary film about Russia’s relationship with the U.S.
 

Series Timeline:

Wednesday, November 13, 19:00 MSK: “Russian Culture at the Turn of the 20th Century”

Description: Fin de siècle Russia was a rich and explosive time for Russian culture. With the shift to the Soviet system, Russians adapted their cultural heritage to create a new cultural foundation. In this conversation we will discuss the many forms of Russian culture – from large festivals to puppet theater to literature —  were used by Russians to push their society forward.

Speaker: Thomas Seifrid

Bio: Professor Seifrid studies twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, particularly that of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s; Russian philosophy of language of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; the life and works of Vladimir Nabokov; and Polish language and culture. His current research examines connections among ideology, literary genre (including theater), and urban space in early Soviet culture.

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Wednesday, November 20, 21:00 MSK: “Crime and Other Tsarist-Era Influences on Early Soviet Literature and Art”

Description: In the early 1900s Russia broke with the past, but the dialogue between writers before and after the revolution continued in the most magical and unexpected ways! In this conversation we will discuss the connections between Chekhov and Nabokov, Gogol and Bulgakov, Dostoevsky and Ilf & Petrov. We’ll also talk about electrification, light and glass, from Lenin’s little lamps to the red stars of the Kremlin.

Speaker: Julia Chadaga

Bio: Julia Chadaga is an Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Her research and teaching interests include Russian literature, material and visual culture, and the relationship between art and crime in Russian cultural history. She teaches courses on Russian language, Russian literature, Russian history through film, and the theory and practice of translation. Her courses frequently include projects that connect students with the Russian-speaking communities of the Twin Cities. She has published articles in the journals Russian Review, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, and Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (New Literary Review). She has an essay in the edited volume Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe and in the forthcoming Oxford University Press Handbook of the Russian Novel. Her book Optical Play: Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) was shortlisted for the Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History. She is currently working with a colleague at Harvard University to develop a website that uses a virtual exhibition of objects from a marketplace in Moscow to teach visitors about Russian history and culture.

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Friday, December 6, 20:00 MSK: “Folk Culture and Women in Literature and Society”

Description: What was the fate of village life and folk culture in the new Soviet era and what has been the role of rural women in preserving and modifying these traditions? In this conversation, we will discuss folk culture since pre-revolutionary Russia, the role of women, and early Soviet female writers.

Speaker: Laura Olson Osterman

Bio: Laura Olson Osterman is a professor in the Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Department of the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 1994 and has an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University (1990). Her first trip to Russia, as a senior in college in 1982, convinced her that she wanted to study the endlessly fascinating Russian culture. Upon her return from Moscow she wrote her senior thesis on contemporary Soviet female-authored short stories. In graduate school and beyond, she continued to pursue her interests in 19th and 20th century Russian literature and culture. In her dissertation she took a new look at a classic novel, Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Professor Osterman teaches courses on Slavic folk culture, Russian fairytales, women in Russian culture; the absurd and supernatural in Russian culture. When not teaching or researching, she might be found singing Russian or Bulgarian folk songs. Professor Osterman sings with Planina: Songs of Eastern Europe. She continues to travel to Bulgaria and Russia to research folk culture.

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Thursday, December 12, 21:00 MSK: "Coming to America: The Hilarious Realities of Ilf & Petrov’s American Adventure"

Description: What was the meaning of America for the Russians who were building communism? What did they learn from Ilf & Petrov’s road trip across the U.S.? In this conversation with Prof. Lisa Kirschenbaum, we’ll discuss how the Soviets used the idea of America to help transform their society and get new insights into that infamous drive through the land of the capitalists.

Speaker: Lisa Kirschenbaum

Bio: Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is professor of history at West Chester University and an award-winning author. Her books explore how individuals navigated the traumas of the twentieth century. She has written about children who grew up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, survivors of the siege of Leningrad, and volunteers in the Spanish civil war. Her most recent book, Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists, reconstructs the Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov’s epic 1935 American road trip to reveal how ordinary people tried to understand one another across linguistic, cultural, and political divides.

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Thursday, December 17, 21:00 MSK: "Culture of Film, Culture in Film"

Description: Everyone loves a good film – and the many good films of Russia and the Soviet Union are an entertaining way to access Russian culture and society. Professor Robert Efird of Virginia Tech will join us to discuss the role of film in the early Soviet period and his use of film in the Russian Studies program at his university. Of special interest to Efird and his students is Tarkovsky, and we will talk about the Russian cultural roots of Tarkovsky’s works.

Speaker: Bob Efird

Bio: Robert Efird is Associate Professor and Director of the Russian program at Virginia Tech and the director of the Russian study abroad program. He has been the director of the Russian Language Flagship at Virginia Tech and co-director of Project Global Officer. His research focuses on the intersection of the philosophy of mind, differential ontology and cinema. Scholarly works include “Isochrony and the Story/Discourse Distinction in Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark”, “Amorphous Forms: Time and Subjectivity in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”, and “Sergei Parajanov’s Differential Cinema”. More recently he is the author of “The Flesh of Time: Solaris and the Chiasmic Image” and the book, "Andrei Tarkovsky: Ivan’s Childhood." He received his PhD in Slavic at the University of Virginia. 

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Wednesday, January 8, 21:00 MSK: "Choosing Pushkin as Russia’s National Poet"

Description: How did Pushkin become Russia’s national poet? And why did Professor Marcus Levitt choose Pushkin as the subject of his scholarship? Join us as we talk to one of the U.S.’s most esteemed Pushkin experts on his work revealing the myths and realities of Pushkin – and Russia itself.

Speaker: Marcus Levitt

Bio: Marcus C. Levitt is Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California.  One main thrust of his scholarly writing has been to better understand the genesis of a modern literature in Russia, and he has written on a broad spectrum of Russian writers from the late seventeenth through twentieth centuries.  His first book, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (1989), considered the cultural and institutional context for Alexander Pushkin’s elevation of to the rank of Russian “national poet.”  His most recent monograph, The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (2011), examines early modern Russia’s demand to be seen and its paradoxical lack of visibility in the later tradition.  A volume of his collected works came out in 2009 as Early Modern Russian Letters: Selected Articles.  He has also co-edited several volumes of essays: on Russian pornography, on violence in Russian culture, on the Russian Satirical Journals of 1905, on the Enlightenment in Russia, a festschrift in honor of Alexander Zholkovsky. He continues to take part in a long-term collaborative effort with Russian scholars to publish a multi-volume critical edition of Alexander Sumarokov’s works, the first volumes of which are to appear later this year.

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ALL AMERICAN CENTER IN MOSCOW EVENTS ARE FREE OF CHARGE / ALL EVENTS OF THE AMERICAN CENTER IN MOSCOW ARE FREE OF CHARGE

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