Lectures and Concerts Video Library

What did a couple of guys decide to do with their Bowdoin education? Not content with simply cold winters in Maine, Evan and Josh embarked on careers that took them to Russia, where they say nights are longest. Separated by nearly 20 years, they arrived in Russia during similar periods. Josh witnessed the first disillusionment with the promises of post-Soviet life, while Evan witnessed Russia throw cold water on some of the norms and views the West had long assumed about Russia. Join us for an informal discussion about living and working in Russia, on being a Bowdoin grad abroad, learning Russian, living in Russia during a time of pandemic, or any other topic you may want to ask two guys living in Moscow.

Evan Gershkovich is a reporter for The Moscow Times, an independent English-language news website covering Russia from its capital city. He was previously a news assistant for The New York Times and graduated from Bowdoin in 2014.

Josh Tulgan works for AFK Sistema, a Moscow-based investment company (www.sistema.com). His company is active in a number of businesses, including telecommunications, agribusiness, healthcare, forestry, retail and a number of tech funds. He graduated from Bowdoin in 1995. Since he visited Russia as a junior at Bowdoin, he has spent close to 25 years in Russia.

The discussion was co-moderated by Laura Howells '20 (Russian and Gov double-major) and Dr. Reed Johnson, Lecturer in Russian.

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What does Russia really want? American speculation on Russia’s actions – what it has or hasn’t done, what it might do – is a major political topic; the guesswork is deafening. Is Russia as cohesive a force as we think? To what degree have their threats to US democracy been successful? Julia Ioffe – author of the illuminating Atlantic cover story “What Putin Really Wants” and the forthcoming book Russia Girl – has emerged as the premier voice to access Russia’s intentions, and what they mean for America. A gifted speaker, Ioffe unpacks this defining geopolitical drama with piercing clarity, showing us how we got here, and what lies ahead.

Julia Ioffe, contributing writer at The Atlantic and a former Russian correspondent for The New Yorker, is a leading authority on Russian-US relations, showing us precisely what is at stake. Ioffe’s area of expertise, built on years of in-depth reporting in Russia for publications that include The New Republic, acknowledges Russia’s threat against American democracy, while placing emphasis on the way the media, right and left, can both over- and-underestimate Russia’s strategic coherence and capabilities. Ioffe’s talks provide a clear-eyed view of the situation, showing us that Russia is a non-partisan issue that every American, whether Democrat or Republican, must think hard about, regardless of political affiliation.

Born in Moscow, Ioffe’s family moved to America when she was seven years old. As a speaker, she conveys Russian-American relations from both sides with clarity and insight. In her talks, as in her Atlantic cover story “What Putin Really Wants,” Ioffe provides colorful, character-rich discussions of Russia’s socio-political structure, its tempestuous historical relationship with America, and how Russia will affect US politics (and policy) moving forward. As she writes in her story, “In the same way that Russians overestimate America, seeing it as an all-powerful orchestrator of global political developments, Americans project their own fears onto Russia, a country that is a paradox of deftness, might, and profound weakness—unshakably steady, yet somehow always teetering on the verge of collapse. Like America, it is hostage to its peculiar history, tormented by its ghosts.”

A graduate of Princeton University and a participant in Columbia Journalism School’s Knight Foundation Case Studies Initiative, Julia Ioffe won a Fulbright Scholarship to return to Russia in 2009, where she worked as the Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker magazine as well as Foreign Policy. In 2012, she became a senior editor for The New Republic in Washington D.C. before moving to The Atlantic to cover politics and world affairs.

Sponsored by the Departments of Russian and Government & Legal Studies, the Charles Weston Pickard Fund, and with the generous support of a loyal Bowdoin family.

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This talk tells the story of Lake Baikal environmentalism in the context of Soviet economic strategies, and it places the Soviet experience into the larger context of the global post-war development of environmentalism.  While we are most familiar with the Soviet Union’s legacy of environmental degradation, the Lake Baikal movement which began in 1958 is a reminder that there did exist important environmentalist efforts in the Soviet Union, and that socialism and environmentalism were not necessarily mutually exclusive. 

Nicholas Breyfogle, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University, is a specialist in imperial Russian history, especially the history of Russian imperialism and of the non-Russian nationalities of the tsarist empire. He is also a specialist in environmental history, and his writings have examined the history of earthquakes in Russia and the human history of water.

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How are contemporary Russian artists and writers representing the country's far north?  This lecture examines the work of photographers, artists and non-fiction writers addressing arctic landscapes and climate change within the distinctive context of Russia's cultural and political history. Professor Costlow is a scholar of Russian literature who has published widely on Russian representations of the natural world, focusing on topics from the northern forest to drought and famine. She is currently working on an anthology of translated texts about Russian nature.

Jane T. Costlow, Clark A. Griffith Professor of environmental studies at Bates College, is a scholar of Russian literature who has published widely on Russian representations of the natural world, focusing on topics from the northern forest to drought and famine. She is currently working on an anthology of translated texts about Russian nature.

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Ivan Turgenev, revered for his skill at depicting ideological strife and unhappy love, was also one Russia's finest nature writers. In his cycle of short stories, Notes of a Hunter (1847-52), he deploys his expert knowledge of the natural world to denounce serfdom as a crime against humanity as well as nature. Professor Hodge is a specialist on 19th-century Russian literature and the author of a forthcoming book on Turgenev and the organic world; he has co-founded a humanities-and-science course about Lake Baikal that features fieldwork in Siberia.

Thomas Hodge, professor of Russian at Wellesley College, is a specialist on nineteenth-century Russian literature and the author of a forthcoming book on Turgenev and the organic world. He has also cofounded a humanities and science course about Lake Baikal that features fieldwork in Siberia.

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Few works of Russian literature have inspired as many films as Anna Karenina, and these cinematic transpositions have in turn increased the popularity of Tolstoy’s novel, particularly in the U.S. This talk will examine how four directors (Clarence Brown, Alexander Zarkhi, Bernard Rose, and Joe Wright) have adapted Anna Karenina, with a focus on their treatment of his adultery theme. These filmmakers’ depictions of Anna and Vronsky’s relationship shed light on the significance the novel – and adultery as a cultural phenomenon – has held for various audiences since its creation.

Alexander Burry is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, as well as adaptation of literature into other media. He has written Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama (Northwestern University Press, 2011) and co-edited Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) with Frederick H. White. He has also published articles on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Meyerhold, and other literary and cultural figures, and is currently working on a book project on the Don Juan theme in Russian culture.

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What does it mean to be a reader of Dostoevsky in the twenty-first century? Almost two hundred years after his birth, his novels are as important as ever. In this age of the endless news cycle, terror, and social upheaval, we face problems Dostoevsky made central to his works: ideas vs. actions, absolute truths vs. negotiable “facts,” self-interest vs. self-sabotage. This talk explores the strategies Dostoevsky developed to dramatize the divided modern consciousness in 1870s Russia and finds contemporary parallels in how we present our lives and ideas online for social consumption today. 

Dr. Kate Holland is Associate Professor of Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Russian literature, culture and theory and coordinates the department’s undergraduate programs. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2004. She is the author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s (Northwestern University Press, 2013), and the coeditor of A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts (forthcoming in 2018 with Academic Studies Press) as well as articles on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Herzen, and Russian Literary Theory. In 2016 she was the co-organizer of an outreach project and conference celebrating 150 years of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. She is the co-organizer of a 2018 international conference and edited volume planned to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth in 2021. She is a board member of the North American Dostoevsky Society, a founder member of that Society’s Readers’ Advisory Board, and book review editor of the literature and culture section of Canadian Slavonic Papers.

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Many of us have heard about the vogue of Paris and France after the First World War, but few know about the exodus to Moscow and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, or the particular appeal of revolutionary Russia to American women. In fact, by the early 1930s so many “American girls” had come “barging into the Red capital” in search of jobs, adventure, or husbands, that news articles were being published on the subject. Paying special attention to African-American and Jewish women and their investment in the Soviet project, this talk will provide an overview of American women’s love affair with Russia from 1905 to 1945: from their admiration and empathy for the female revolutionaries who challenged the Czar; to their attempts to re-envision domestic life, romantic relationships, and work using Soviet models; to their efforts to embody and perform revolutionary selves in a context supposedly free of racism and anti-Semitism. A century after the Russian Revolution, what does the forgotten story of “American Girls in Red Russia” tell us about where we’ve been, and who we are now?

Julia Mickenberg is associate professor of American studies, and is currently serving as Interim Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and Acting Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author, most recently, of American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

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2017 marks the Centenary of Russia's first democratic revolution which brought down Europe's last old regime and paved the way for the Communist dictatorship. Although the significance and global implications of this arguably most consequential event of the 20th century have long been recognized, the debates on the origins and character of the February Revolution show no signs of abating. Was it primarily a social or a political revolution? Were the moderate politicians of the Duma (parliament's lower house) merely followers or reluctant leaders of the popular uprising? What triggered their decision to take power, thereby legitimizing the Petrograd uprising and transforming it into a full-scale revolution?

Professor Lyandres is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His current research focuses on the intellectual origins of the revolutionary regime in 1917 and the politics of the February Revolution. His publications include: The Bolshevik's German Gold Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations (1995); The Memoirs of Alexander Guchkov, President of the State Duma and a Minister of War in the Provisional Government (1993), with A. V. Smolin; A Chronicle of the Civil War in Siberia and Exile in China: The Diaries of Petr Vasil'evich Vologodskii, 1918-1925 (2002), in 2 volumes (with Dietmar Wulff), and most recently, The Fall of Tsarism: Untold Stories of the February 1917 Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013. He has held major fellowships from the German-American Academic Council Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, the NEH, and the Earhart Foundation.

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This concert presents a variety of musical settings of poems by the great Russian poet and “father of Russian literature” Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), by composers including Mikhail Glinka, Sergei Rachmaninov, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Nikolai Medtner, and others...

Pelletier and Ms. Kay are acclaimed musicians who have performed as soloists and in ensembles in many elite venues throughout the world; they are both on the music faculty at Princeton University. They are joined in two pieces by local Maine musicians, violinist Yasmin Vitalius and cellist Eliza Meyer.

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The Zolotoj Plyos folk ensemble presents a virtual journey through Russia, with demonstrations of musical styles, costumes, songs, dancing, and more than thirty Russian folk instruments. Founded in 1994 in the city of Saratov, Russia and currently based in Belgium, the ensemble is comprised of members Alexander Solovov, Elena Sadina, and Sergei Grachev, who collectively play more than thirty Russian folk instruments, including the bayan, chromatic and diatonic accordions, the balalaika, domra, guitar, zhaleika, clarinet, saxophone, various percussion instruments, and Russian bells.

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