Oxford Pushkin Seminar

[DAVID M BETHEA]

Pushkin Seminar at Oxford University, July 8-15, 2007


The editors of a new Pushkin edition are organizing a one-week seminar at Oxford University to take place July 8-15, 2007.  The purpose of the seminar is to acquaint younger generation scholars (advanced students, graduate students, recent Ph.D.’s) with the editing principles of the new edition and to recruit potential editors/commentators for future volumes.  While participants are not required to be Pushkin specialists or native Russians, they should have a solid knowledge of the Pushkin era and fluency in the language.  The seminar will be convened at Wadham College and expenses will be paid – room, board, and travel – for the participants.  Five places at the seminar will be set aside for participants on a competitive basis.  Those interested should submit a cover letter, cv, writing sample, and one-two letters of support from senior scholars to: Oxford Pushkin Seminar Screening Committee, The Pushkin Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706; electronic
 submissions (with the subject heading “Oxford Pushkin Seminar”) are also possible at pushkin at slavic.wisc.edu.  The application deadline is March 15, 2007, with notification of the final results of the competition to take place by April 15, 2007.  All completed applications will be acknowledged.

The co-organizers of the seminar are David Bethea (Wisconsin, Oxford), Alexander Dolinin (Wisconsin, St. Petersburg), and Alexander Ospovat (UCLA, Moscow).  Over the past several years they have been directly involved in the editorship of Sochineniia Pushkina (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2006-), the first volume of which, Poemy i povesti (part one), has recently appeared.  Volume 2, Boris Godunov, is now in production and will appear in the spring.  Additional volumes are in the planning stages.  In the preface to Poemy i povesti David Bethea (the general editor) explains the rationale for the new edition: the “Pushkin House” tradition of textology, while fruitful for much of the twentieth century, now needs to be modified by an approach that looks at the given work from various angles simultaneously: compositional history, the physical text as Pushkin approved it, literary and historical contexts, native and foreign sources, contemporary commentary, etc.

The seminar will be conducted by leading Pushkinists from around the world.  The tentative schedule is: Sunday, July 8 (arrival and orientation); Monday, July 9 (reference works, archives, textology: Alexander Dolinin, Alexander Ospovat, Maria Virolainen, Oleg Proskurin); Tuesday, July 10 (“Andzhelo”: Alexander Dolinin); Wednesday, July 11 (Ruslan i Liudmila: Oleg Proskurin); Thursday, July 12 (Boris Godunov: Maria Virolainen); Friday, July 13 (Kapitanskaia dochka: Alexander Opsovat); Saturday, July 14 (summaries, future plans).  Local Oxford academics and students will also be participating in the seminar’s activities.

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