Seminars

This talk connects two significant events in the cultural life of the 1860s: the critical response to Chernyshevsky’s revolutionary novel, Chto delat’? and Black American tragedian Ira Aldridge’s tours to Russian capitals. Scholars have shown that race is an important emblem of Chernyshevsky’s worldview in the novel (Paperno, Sobol); however, it also played a role in conservative polemics against it. In these years, negative reception of Aldridge’s performances in Russia’s literary journalism pinpoints the growing association in the cultural imaginary between race and radical politics. These moments demonstrate a curious phenomenon in the Russian discourse of the time in which racial thinking, legislated and systematized in western European and American spaces, began to interact with the separate cultural field of post-Emancipation Russia. Broadly, these cases demonstrate the transnational mobility and appropriation of racial stereotypes.

How can we use music and sound to understand sites of atrocity in the former USSR, including the millions of hectares destroyed by the Gulag? I discuss and perform musical examples from two unknown survivors of the Gulag: Vsevolod Zaderatsky and Mikhail Nosyrev. Their music can be read as testimony, offering possible insights into the effect of detention on individuals including lingering repression of their work and their resistance to 'reeducation'. I discuss my work with families to recover two scores from these composers, how to read extramusical biography into musical texts, and most importantly play musical examples as an active intervention against the intentional silencing of dissident artists. Looking beyond music, sound can be combined with geospatial data to immersively understand the sites of detention themselves. I present two possible sites with recordings I took in 2023 and 2024 from Qazakstan and from the Saami people in the circumpolar north (Solovki). In both cases, sound first allows us to hear remote and inaccessible locations of atrocity and can be integrated with mapping and other data. This use of sound is also documentary, if unlike the aestheticized testament of music, creating an authentic rendering of Gulag spaces. In the Qazak and Saami cases, documenting the spaces of the Gulag is also an intervention against Soviet and Nazi colonization of indigenous land, primarily through revealing the catastrophic damage caused by the imposition of camps, radioactivity, and the uneasy and spectral presence of a 'violent dead'. Using music and sound, I present a variety of new methodologies to research the Gulag, to understand space, the repression of intellectuals and efficacy of Soviet re-education, and the impact of detention on land and on repressed individuals.

In the course of only fifteen years, from 1924 to 1939, the First Wave of the Russian emigration went through a radical transformation of their identity: from defiantly proclaiming its 'mission' to acknowledging its ultimate failure as a 'state' without a territory. What processes in Russia and abroad stood behind this transformation? What lessons can be drawn from the past for the present-day emigration from Putin’s Russia since 2014 – and especially since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022? The seminar will take as a case study a corpus of essays on exile by Russian émigrés of the interwar period and analyze the evolution of their self-fashioning as a community in flux, throughout the years. 'Why Are We Here?' (adopted from the eponymous essay by Georgy Fedotov) is a work in progress towards a forthcoming book series by the Tamizdat Project.

In the late-Soviet period, especially during perestroika, writers assumed a key role in the national movements of Russia and other republics. The Romantic association of writers and the nation was reinforced during the Soviet period, as was writers' cultural capital, and when open politics became possible in the late perestroika era, they were better positioned than almost anybody to speak for the nation and to convert their literary capital into political one (Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism, 2006). Subsequent scholarship on the national movements of that era has largely taken these writers at their word, adopting their largely primordialist language and understanding of the nation. By applying the class analysis of late socialist societies pioneered by Ivan Szelenyi (Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, 1974) and updated by his students (esp. Georgi Derluguian in Bourdieu's Admirer in the Caucasus, 2004) to the trajectories of a number of late- and post-Soviet writers such as Vasil' Bykau, Silva Kaputikyan, and Valentin Rasputin, I will advance a critical reading of the writers' role in the nationalist movements, namely, as a class project that massively increased its power in the republics during late perestroika by mobilizing nationalism only to be completely deflated when its enabling condition--a culture-centric, non-capitalist, authoritarian Soviet state--was no more.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, European states moved from observing what had been "customs of land warfare" toward codifying these "customs" into the "laws of land warfare" through treaties and conventions. Curiously, Imperial Russia was at the forefront of this effort. One of the early attempts to produce a draft code of land warfare occurred in 1874. Four years later, imperial Russia was in a major war with the Ottoman Empire, the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War. And—again surprisingly—the imperial government and army tried to observe these newly-emerging norms of land warfare. Doing so did not prevent atrocities and tragedies. But it did shape how Russian authorities conceived of the war. Prof. Holquist's talk will measure how the Russian imperial government tried to act according to the newly-emerging "laws of war" in this conflict.