Russian Century Conference Brings Together Academics, Disciplines
On September 30 and October 1, the MacMillan Center welcomed academics from both sides of the Atlantic for a conference on the literary, visual, and performing arts of the Russian Empire, titled “The Russian Century (1801-1917).” Organized by Yale Slavic Languages and Literatures Professors Molly Brunson and Bella Grigoryan, the conference featured numerous discussions of canon-formation, intertextuality and intermediality, imperial peripheries, and the legacy of the Golden Age of Russian literature and the performing arts.
The conference featured seven panels that included discussions on the reception of the Golden Age canon in the West, the interplay of different kinds of media in Russian literary and performance arts, and the afterlives of nineteenth-century classics. While some panels focused primarily on literature, the vast majority of panels simultaneously discussed theatrical performance, painters, musical compositions, and opera all under one uniting theme.
Several themes were clear throughout the course of the conference. Scholars challenged accepted notions about which sorts of cultural production are considered canonical, and which lie on the peripheries of academic and public understandings. Anne Lounsberry (Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University), for instance, presented a talk on why Russian author Melnikov-Pechersky is often excluded from the syllabi of most survey courses on Russian literature. She explored the idea that authors thoughts to incorporate too many localisms are often seen as provincial and marginal, when compared to “stolichnaya” (capital, or big-city) literature. Bella Grigoryan (Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale) similarly challenged ideas of imperial peripheries in a talk on Armenian national poet Khachatur Abovyan. She argued that Armenian literature in the Russian Empire could not be reduced to a simple narrative of colonial subjects in a large empire. She demonstrated how Abovyan’s “Wounds of Amenia” could be read as hyperlocal to a modern Armenian, essentially operating under a complicated imperial reality that is simultaneously orientalizing and orientalized.
Other common themes were the intersections between different artist networks, the interplay between before modes of artistic production, and the importance of constantly reexamining the texts, art, and music of a century that cannot simply be reduced to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. On a panel dedicated to “Intermediality,” Marina Frolova-Walker (Music, University of Cambridge) discussed the literary relationship between opera libretti and the different incarnations of literary texts on which they are based. Her talk presented an often-ignored discussion of the literariness of opera libretti, detailing echoes between the libretti of different operas and how certain examples even preserve the meter of the original text.
Molly Brunson (Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale) similarly shed light on the underexamined interrelatedness between media in the same panel in her talk on “Vasily Surikov’s Oblique Perspectives.” Throughout her talk, Professor Brunson focused on Surikov’s “Boyarina Morozova” which is housed in the Moscow State Tretyakov Gallery. While she began her talk with a traditional close analysis of the painting –discussing vanishing lines, depictions of icons, and the use of color in the painting – Professor Brunson concluded her talk by demonstrating the extent to which the painting was in dialogue with the era of industrialization in Russia contemporary to its painting. She showed an early sketch of the painting that juxtaposed the oblique perspective of the protesting Boyarina Morozova with the image of a moving locomotive, proving that the startling perspectives of Surikov’s painting were not unique to the artistic genre.
It is also worth noting that the discussions and interventions that took place throughout the Russian Century conference were not limited to dialogue between Western academics, nor to scholars of Slavic departments. Daniil Petrov (Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory) and Svetlana Usacheva (Moscow State Tretyakov Gallery) both presented talks on a panel called “The Historical Turn,” about composer Mily Balakirev and painter Feder Alekseev, respectively. The presence of both Petrov and Usacheva was greatly appreciated at the conference, as both represented institutions that preserve and artistically study the cultural artifacts and production on which the conference was based. In terms of disciplinarian diversity, the conference included academics from Slavic, Music, History of Art, Comparative Literature, and Theatre departments.
The Russian Century was funded by the generous support of the European Studies Council, the Russian Studies Program (with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation), the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the WHC Working Group on the Global Nineteenth Century.
Written by David Kurkovskiy, Class of 2017, who is studying Russian and Eastern European Studies and Computer Science.