Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 27, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Natalia Skorokhod. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
This talk explores how the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine has reshaped contemporary Russophone drama. Since February 2022, playwrights in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and in exile have faced repression, displacement, and the collapse of cultural institutions. These conditions have generated new dramatic strategies and genres: from absurdist comedy and the reinvention of the fairy tale in documentary form, to intimate personal narratives reflecting exile and homelessness. The lecture examines how the war transformed festivals and drama communities, and how the lack of freedom of expression paradoxically stimulated experimental forms that question identity, humanism, and rationality under threat.
Dr. Natalia Skorokhod is a theatre scholar, playwright, and curator, formerly Professor of Drama at the Russian State Institute of Stage Arts (St. Petersburg). Now based in Berlin as a scholar at risk, she is the author of three monographs and numerous works on contemporary Russophone drama.
