Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 17, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Sergei Lebedev. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
Russia’s unrepentant past haunts its present. With the brutal war of aggression against Ukraine and the crushing of domestic dissent, it seems that Russia is reverting to both Soviet and imperial times, resuming and expanding state violence and the pursuit of colonial conquest.
To what extent can this regression be explained by the failure of Russian literature and culture in general to work through the totalitarian past? What was this failure exactly? And what could now be done in terms of writing and critical self-assessment?
Sergei Lebedev was born in Moscow in 1981 and worked for seven years on geological expeditions in northern Russia and Central Asia. Lebedev is a poet, essayist, and journalist. His novels have been translated into twenty three languages and have received great acclaim in the English-speaking world. The New York Review of Books has hailed Lebedev as “the best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.”
