Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 9, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Department of Slavic Languages for the one-day symposium Words and Pictures: Intersections of Text and Image in Russian Culture. Organized by Tatiana Smoliarova (University of Geneva, Switzerland), Yuri Leving (Princeton University), and Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University).
Conference Program
April 10, 2026
1219 International Affairs Building, 420 W 118th St.
10:00 – 11:30am | Panel 1: Mediation: Illustration as Visual Hermeneutics
Chair: Irina Reyfman
- Tatiana Smoliarova, The Anachronistic Image: On Diachronic Illustration
- Aleksandar Bošković, Cinépoetry Ideology Converter: Constructivist Photomontages for Maiakovskii’s ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’
- Oleg Minin, Visualizing the Émigré Word: Literature and Illustration in the Work of Mikhail Drizo
11:45am – 1:15pm | Panel 2: Inscription: Authors at the Image Threshold
Chair: Konstantin Mitroshenkov
- Eugene Ostashevsky, Ten-Four: Vasily Kamensky’s Ferroconcrete Poems and Larionov’s ‘Exhibit No. 4: Futurists, Rayists, Primitism’
- Liliya Dyachenko, Between Dreams and Calligraphy: The Graphic Construction of Identity in Alexei Remizov (1920s-1930s)
- Yuri Leving, A Flotilla of Memory: Dmitri Nabokov’s ‘A History of Boats’
2:00 – 3:00pm | Keynote
Chair: Mark Lipovetsky
- Serguei Oushakine, Mental Eyes and Literature Spectators: Making an Optical Turn in Early Soviet Russia
3:15 – 4:15pm | Panel 3: Embodiment: Letters Performed and Materialized
Chair: Myles Garbarini
- Tatiana Krasil’nikova, Body, Letter, Ritual: Poetic Performances by Ry Nikonova and Rimma Gerlovina
- Stephanie Sandler, Picturing Performance: Ry Nikonova’s ‘Genetic Chains of Poetry’
4:30 – 6:00pm | Panel 4: Circulation: Synthetic Forms in Public Space
Chair: Andrey Ustinov
- Dassia N. Posner, The Scenography of Actor Emotion
- Elizaveta Senatorova, Collaging Exile: Vagrich Bakhchanyan and the Global Networks of Mail Art
- Polina Barskova, Postcards from the Siege of Leningrad: Ekphrasis, Propaganda, and the Production of Ambiguity
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
