Slavic Languages and Literatures

Gordana Crnkovic’s latest book, Post-Yugoslav Literature and Film: Fires, Foundations, Flourishes, has just been published in both the U.S. and Europe. More information may be found at http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=165864&SearchType=Basic

A review of Galya Diment’s latest book, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, appeared in the March 23, 2012 edition to The Times Literary Supplement. UW readers have access to this review through UW Libraries (http://uwashington.worldcat.org/title/tls-the-times-literary-supplement/oclc/2241740&referer=brief_results).

During winter quarter Affiliate Faculty Claudia Jensen taught a class with people hungry for education: honors students and former prison inmates in what has become the Post-Prison Community Collaboration Project.

Friend of the Slavic Department Mary Sherhart was honored by the Ethnic Heritage Council on March 2, 2012 with the Aspasia Phoutrides Pulakis Award for her significant contributions to a Northwest ethnic community. Mary, organizer of the Slavic Fest, is one of America’s leading artists in Balkan singing, a rare non-native recognized and loved by ethnic audiences. Mary excels at building bridges through the shared joy of music, overcoming political differences in the Balkan community. Congratulations, Mary! Your award is richly deserved!

Check out the latest issue of the journal, Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema Articles, for articles by former grad student Emily Schuckman Matthews (PhD 2008) and current grad student Lena Doubivko. Congratulations to both!

Galya Diment will be giving readings of her latest book, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, at Elliott Bay Book Store on January 24, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. and at University Book Store on January 30, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

José Alaniz has been elected chair of the International Comic Arts Forum, the leading comics studies conference in America.

The UW Polish Studies Endowment Committee is hosting an exhibit honoring the 100th anniversary of Polish scientist Maria Skłodowska-Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry through December 16 in the north lobby of the UW’s Allen Library. The exhibit is cosponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland and created by the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Museum in Warsaw.

Maria Skłodowska-Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Maria Skłodowska-Curie, her husband Pierre, and Antoine Henri Becquerel in 1903 for their research on radiation phenomena. Her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, was awarded in 1911 for the discovery of polonium and radium.

The exhibit is free and open to the public.

Professor Galya Diment’s new book, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, is out from McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Samuel Koteliansky (1880-1955) fled the pogroms of Russia in 1911 and established himself as a friend of many of Britain’s literati and intellectuals, who were fascinated by his homeland’s more civilized side: the Ballets Russes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Kot, as he was known, soon became an indispensable guide to Russian culture for England’s leading writers, artists, and intellectuals, who in turn helped introduce English audiences to Russian works. A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury looks at the remarkable life and influence that an outsider had on the tightly knit circle of Britain’s cultural elite. Among Koteliansky’s friends were Katherine Mansfield, Leonard and Virginia Woolf -for whose Hogarth Press he translated many Russian classics – Mark Gertler, Lady Ottoline Morrell, H.G. Wells, and Dilys Powell. But it was his close and turbulent friendship with D.H. Lawrence, with whom he had copious correspondence, that proved to be Koteliansky’s lasting legacy. In a lively and vibrant narrative, Galya Diment shows how, despite Kot’s determination, he could never shake off the dark aspects of his past or overcome the streak of anti-Semitism that ran through British society and could be found in many of his famous literary friends. A stirring account of the early-twentieth century, Jewish emigre life, and English and Russian letters, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury casts new light – and shadows – on the giants of English modernism.

Professor Barbara Henry’s new book, Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama, is out from University of Washington Press.

Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the “Golden Age” of New York’s Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian emigre. His most successful and scandalous dramas–The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan–were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land.

Gordin’s life and his plays held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of one’s past, one could write one’s own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin’s career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities among his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays.