Erik Bulatov painting Horizons (style: Soviet Realism)

Soviet Cultures: October 25 and 26

Join the Conference and celebrate Professor Clark’s Legacy!

Charting the future of the study of Soviet culture

This international conference aims to chart current and future directions in the study of Soviet cultures. Our particular focus will be the legacy of Professor Katerina Clark, B. E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Yale University, whose pathbreaking scholarship in twentieth-century Russian and Soviet culture made her one of the most influential Slavists and comparatists of her generation.

Headshot of Katerina Clark.

Soviet Cultures: The Legacies of Katerina Clark

All scheduled conference events will take place in Humanities Quadrangle 276 (320 York Street)

Oct. 25

1:30-2 Welcoming Remarks

2-3:45  Panel 1: The Soviet Novel and Its Legacies 

Chair: Peter Holquist (University of Pennsylvania)

Discussant: Roman Utkin (Wesleyan University)

  • Maria Sidorkina (UT-Austin), “Centripetal Politics vs Centrifugal Meanings in Platonov’s 1920s Novels”
  • Devin Fore (Princeton), “Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Narrative Technique in the Cultural Revolution”
  • Lilya Kaganovsky (UCLA), “Boy gets tractor, plus or minus girl: gender vs genre in the Soviet Novel”
  • Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia), “Tricksters in Socialist Realism: Permissible Spontaneity or Fake Consciousness?”

3:45-4:15 coffee break

4:15-5 The Many Faces of Chingiz Aitmatov: a book manuscript presentation by Peter Holquist, Katie Trumpener (Yale University), and Nancy Condee (University of Pittsburgh): on the manuscript of Katerina Clark’s last book.

5:15-6:45 Keynote address: “Memories of a Friendship,” by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Professor, Australian Catholic University; Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, University of Chicago.

Abstract: Katerina and I were born in the same month in the same Australian city to parents who knew each other. In our early 20s, we both - though separately - went to the Soviet Union to study. Later, we both worked in United States, our paths crisscrossing  in different but closely related fields of Soviet studies.  It was a lifelong friendship, and moreover a unique one: for each of us, the other was the friend who, sharing all three strands of our lives (Australian, American, Soviet/Russian), never had to have anything explained.

6:45 Catered dinner

Oct. 26

8-9 Breakfast

Twenty-three boxes of books from Katy’s library will be available for perusal/ adopting in HQ 342 (3rd floor of HQ, where the conference is held)

9-10:45 Panel 2: Revisions of Literary and Cultural History

Chair: Anastasia Kostina (Columbia University)
Discussant: Masha Shpolberg (Bard College)

  • Elizabeth Papazian (University of Maryland), “Sleeping with a copy of Cement under your pillow, Or, high and low in the study of culture”
  • Bella Grigoryan (University of Pittsburgh), “Reading 18th-century Russian Literature Circa 1933.”
  • Caryl Emerson (Princeton), “Katy’s Bakhtin”
  • Daria Ezerova (Cambridge University), “Discovering Moscow with Katerina Clark”

10:45 coffee break

11-12:45 Panel 3: Soviet Culture as World Culture

Chair: David Engerman (Yale University)

Discussant: Michael Denning (Yale University)

  • Benjamin Baer (Princeton University), “Fellow Travelers”
  • Michael David-Fox (Georgetown University), “Katerina Clark’s Ecosystem”
  • Masha Salazkina (Concordia University), “From Literary Commons to World Cinema: Eurasia Without Borders and Methodologies of Transnational Film Studies”
  • Jane Sharp (Rutgers), “Rethinking Moscow’s Thaw: Abstraction in the Khrushchev Era”

12:45-1:45 Lunch

1:45-3:30 Panel 4: Beyond Russian

Chair: Viktoria Paranyuk (Pace University)

Discussant: Samuel Hodgkin (Yale University)

  • Raisa Sidenova (Newcastle University), “Kyrgyz Documentary Between Center and Periphery”
  • Rossen Djagalov (NYU), “Peaking during Stagnation: Multinational Soviet Literature on the Pages of the Friendship of the Peoples Magazine.”
  • Michael Kunichika (Amherst College), “Cultural Criticism and the Moment of Anti-Imperialism”

3:30-4 coffee break

4-5:30 Keynote address: “Reading the Unreadable, or How Katerina Clark showed us the Beauty of All the Wrong Things,” by Nancy Condee, Professor, University of Pittsburgh

Abstract: Encouraging us to read in ways entirely different from what we had been taught, Katerina Clark went on to support our consideration of things we had been taught to dismiss. Rummaging alongside her, we found new ways of thinking that have helped to reshape Slavic studies.

The conference is generously sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, the European Studies Council, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale.

Banner image: Erik Bulatov, Horizon