Recap | Exploring Émigré Archives and Sacred Prints in REEES and Beinecke Object Study Seminars

This spring the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Study Program partnered with the Beinecke Library to offer two Object Study Seminars for scholars and students. We welcomed Yasha Klots and Justin Willson and invited them to share their approaches to analyzing items from Yale special collections in a hands-on, interactive setting.  

The March session was led by Yasha Klots, Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at Hunter College (CUNY) and director of the Tamizdat Project, which has grown to become “one of the largest collections of contraband Russian literature in the world.” He shared his thinking about materials from Beinecke Library’s renowned collection of Russian émigré archives, including unpublished sources from the archives of Nina Berberova, Joseph Brodsky, Boris Filippov, Leonid Rzhevsky and others. He discussed the dilemmas he faces as an editor who is publishing some of these sources in forthcoming Tamizdat Project books. Participants explored the visual and textual sources together with Klots and discussed the periodization of Russian emigration and the significance of dissident voices in the past and present. 

The March session was led by Justin Willson, Assistant Professor in the History of Art at Yale, who specializes in Byzantine and early Slavic art. He shared with participants some of the central questions that animate his research and then engaged them in exploring materials from the Beinecke Library’s collection of early Balkan and Slavic books and maps. Drawing on scholarship and work in art museums, Willson invited participants to closely analyze the ways in which print transformed the production of sacred and secular images between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Participants explored the work of master woodblock printer Il’ia in L’viv, Greco-Slavic engravers in Karyes on Mount Athos, revivalist lithographers in Moscow, and book illuminators who imitated printed frontispieces in manuscripts.  

While offering opportunities to learn from Klots and Willson as researchers and educators, these sessions also served as a forum for community around collections-based teaching and research, where participants could interact with library collections in the context of their active use for scholarship. We hope to repeat the format in future semesters and welcome suggestions for presentations.