Please join the Harriman Institute and the Department of Slavic Languages for a joint book launch celebrating three new books by Columbia faculty: Ofer Dynes’s The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2026), Yana Skorobogatov’s Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union (University of Chicago Press, 2026), and Mark Lipovetsky’s The Soviet Trickster: Cynicism and Its Subversions (Cornell University Press, 2026). Moderated by Ben Hooyman.
Each author will offer a brief overview of their work followed by a short Q&A period with the audience.
About the Books
The Fiction of the State locates the origins of modern Jewish literature in the political upheavals that transformed Europe at the end of the eighteenth century: the partitions of Poland, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. As Austria, Russia, and Prussia consolidated their rule over the former Polish lands, Jewish intellectuals turned to prose, poetry, and drama to engage in political debate and make sense of the new imperial order. Drawing on archival research and close readings of Hebrew and Yiddish texts, Dynes presents modern Jewish literature not simply as the product of an internal struggle between tradition and modernity, but as a field of negotiation among multiple local and imperial belongings.
Fate in My Hands offers a history of the death penalty in the Soviet Union after Stalin told through the experiences of those who endured it. Following the reinstatement of the death penalty for homicide in 1954, nearly forty thousand Soviet citizens were executed before the collapse of the USSR. Drawing on previously inaccessible criminal-court records, as well as the letters and personal objects left behind by the condemned, Skorobogatov recovers the voices of prisoners who appealed for forgiveness and of the families, friends, and officials drawn into their cases.
The Soviet Trickster examines some of the most enduring rogues, jesters, swindlers, and transgressors in Soviet and post-Soviet literature, film, visual art, and performance. Lipovetsky explores the trickster’s revolutionary messianism, dubious ethics, relationship to empire, place in underground culture, and role in Soviet gender politics. Moving across the political and cultural history of the twentieth century, the book shows how the trickster could embody the cynicism and contradictions of Soviet modernity while also opening spaces for play, creativity, freedom, and subversion.
About the Authors
Ofer Dynes is Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and headed its Program in Yiddish Studies. His first book, The Fiction of the State, received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is also a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar.
Yana Skorobogatov is the Harriman Assistant Professor of Russian and Soviet History at Columbia University. A social historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, she specializes in the late and post-Soviet periods. She is currently developing a second book on the transition from communism to capitalism on the Russian island of Sakhalin. She received her PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mark Lipovetsky is Professor and Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Languages. He has published extensively on Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Dmitry Prigov, Soviet literary and cinematic tricksters, Soviet underground culture, and post-Soviet literature. He is one of four coauthors of A History of Russian Literature and a coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture. His honors include the Andrei Bely Prize and the AATSEEL Award for Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship.
