"From My Wondrous, Beautiful Far-Away": Modern Russian Literature in Retrospect, A Conference in Memory of Robert A. Maguire, March 17-19, 2006, Columbia University

[Douglas Greenfield]

"Rus! Rus! I see thee, from my wondrous, beautiful far-away, thee I see: 
all is poor, scattered and comfortless in thee; the gaze will be neither 
gladdened nor awe-struck by bold marvels of nature crowned by bold 
marvels of art...

				Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
				(trans. Robert A. Maguire)


The Harriman Institute at Columbia University presents

"From My Wondrous, Beautiful Far-Away":
Modern Russian Literature in Retrospect

A Conference in Memory of Robert A. Maguire
	March 17-19, 2006


Social Hall, Union Theological Seminary
3041 Broadway at 121st Street, New York, NY 10027

All events are free and open to the public.

FRIDAY, MARCH 17

9:30
OPENING REMARKS

10-12
GOGOL AND SELF-FASHIONING

Chair, William Mills Todd, Harvard

Irina Reyfman, Columbia
What Makes a Gentleman?: Revisiting Gogol's Diary of a Madman

Nina Gourianova, Northwestern
Gogol and Kruchenykh

Emma Lieber, Columbia
"Where is the Sweet Revolution?": Gogol and Babel from the 21st Century

1:30-4
NEITHER IRON NOR IRONIC:
RUSSIAN-WESTERN METABOLISM RECONSIDERED

Chair, David Goldfarb, Columbia

Elizabeth Valkenier, Columbia
Peredvizhniki and Mir iskusstva: Two Worlds

Katerina Clark, Yale
Rethinking the 1920s without the Iron Curtain

Devin Fore, Cornell
Caricature and Montage in 1936: Heartfield, Tret'iakov, Klutsis

Carol Ueland, Drew
A Post-Modernist Revisits Myths of the Silver Age:
Andrei Makine’s The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

4:30-6:30
DOMESTICATING THE GRAND NARRATIVE

Chair, Rebecca Stanton, Columbia

Douglas Greenfield, Columbia
Page-ing Dr. Werner: Physician to the Stars

Eric Naiman, UC Berkeley
Children in the Master and Margarita

Boris Gasparov, Columbia
Rediscovering Death after a Time of Terror: Shostakovich’s Eleventh 
Quartet and the Problem of Narrative Thanatology

6:30-8
OPENING RECEPTION

SATURDAY, MARCH 18

9-11	
JOYS OF HIGH STALINISM

Chair, Stephen Kotkin, Princeton

Kevin Platt, University of Pennsylvania
Gothic Ivan the Terrible: Or, the Horrific Pleasures of Russian 
Despotism (1920s-1940s)

Simon Morrison, Princeton
Prokofiev's Stalinist Works, De-Stalinized

Andrew Hicks, Columbia
Negotiating Molodaia gvardiia, 1943-1951

11:30-1:30
DEFAMILIARIZING FORMALISM

Chair, Michael Flier, Harvard

Susanne Fusso, Wesleyan
Reevaluating Impressionism: Gogol, Annensky,
Eichenbaum

Caryl Emerson, Princeton
Krasnaia nov', "belyi" Bakhtinskii kruzhok: A Thought
Experiment for the 1920s

Thomas Seifrid, USC
Shklovsky, Gogol, and Others: Textual Energies
Reconsidered

3-5
SYMBOLISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Chair, Michael Wachtel, Princeton

Irene Masing-Delic, Ohio State
The Rose Gate and the Ant King, or the Poet's and the People's Shared 
Legacy of Contamination and Vision of Purification in Blok's Mythology 
of the West and Russia

Kirsten Lodge, Columbia
"Late Epigones of Pagan Decadence": Briusov's "The Last Martyrs" as a 
Parody of Russian Symbolism

Bernice Rosenthal, Fordham
Symbolism, Futurism, Rock 'n' Roll

5:30-7:30		
THE NARRATIVE OF SPACE AND THE SPACE OF
NARRATIVE

Chair, Richard Wortman, Columbia

Rebecca Stanton, Barnard
 From "Underground" to "In the Basement": How Odessa
Replaced Petersburg as Capital of the Russian Literary
Imagination

Tench Coxe, Columbia
Perceiving Moscow

Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Barnard
The Red Poppy: The City as Stage for Cultural
Confrontation

SUNDAY, MARCH 19

9:30-12
RECONFIGURING NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVES

Chair, Elizabeth Beaujour, Hunter College

Liza Knapp, Columbia
Gogol and Tolstoy at Vanity Fair and in the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Cathy Popkin, Columbia
Far Afield

Ellen Chances, Princeton
Time, Epoch, and Diary of a Writer: How to Assess
Dostoevsky's Journalism?

Robert Belknap, Columbia
A Narratological Reading of Dostoevsky’s Besy

1:30-4
METAPHYSICAL AND ETHICAL LEGACIES OF RUSSIAN REALISM

Chair, Melissa Frazier, Sarah Lawrence

Hugh McLean, UC Berkeley
"Buried as a Writer and as a Man": The Puzzle of Family Happiness

Valentina Izmirlieva, Columbia
Lolita as "Crime" and "Pun"

Ilya Vinitsky, University of Pennsylvania
Supernatural Naturalism: The Quest for Reality in Russian Literature of 
the 1860s

Vadim Shkolnikov, Columbia
Idealism and Intervention: On the Realization of Russia in the Age of 
Philosophical Circles


The organizers gratefully acknowledge the support of University Seminars

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