This event was held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. 

Please join us for a panel discussion about Russian Formalist Yuri Tynianov. This event is part of our Contemporary Culture Series.

In 2019, Academic Studies Press published Permanent Evolution, the first English-language volume of theoretical works by Yuri Tynianov, one of the most dazzling representatives of Russian Formalism. This panel of translators and scholars will discuss the meaning of Tynianov’s ideas for the present-day humanities, and Russian studies in particular.

PANELISTS

Boris Gasparov, Bakhmeteff Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies, Columbia University

Daria Khitrova, Harvard University; author of the introduction to Permanent Evolution

Ainsley Morse, Dartmouth College; editor and translator of Permanent Evolution

Sergei Oushakine, Princeton University; editor of the three-volume anthology on Russian Formalism

Ilya Vinitsky, Princeton University; scholar of 19th and 20th century Russian literature

Moderator: Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University

Biographies

Boris Gasparov is Boris Bakhmeteff Professor emeritus of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. He also teaches at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. His scholarly interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, Russian music, philosophy of language, Russian and European Romanticism.

Ainsley Morse teaches at Dartmouth College and translates Russian and former Yugoslav literatures. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, particularly unofficial or “underground” poetry, as well as the avant-garde and children’s literature. In addition to Permanent Evolution, recent publications include F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (edited with Galina Rymbu and Eugene Ostashevsky), Andrei Egunov-Nikolev’s “Soviet pastoral” Beyond Tula (ASP), and, with Bela Shayevich, Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems by Igor Kholin (UDP) and Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See (UDP 2013).

Ilya Vinitsky is Professor of Russian literature in the Slavic Department at Princeton University. His main fields of expertise are Russian Romanticism and Realism, the history of emotions, and nineteenth- century intellectual and spiritual history. His books include Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia (Northwestern University Press, 2015) Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism (Toronto University Press, 2009; Choice Magazine’s list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010) and A Cultural History of Russian Literature, co-written with Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Polity Press, 2009). He also co-edited Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and published a chapter on the history of madness in literature and art in the recent Routledge History of Madness & Mental Health. His most personal book, The Count of Sardinia: Dmitry Khvostov and Russian Culture (New Literary Observer, 2017; in Russian) investigates the phenomenon of anti-poetry in Russian literary tradition from the 18th through the 21st century and focuses on the literary biography and cultural function of the king of Russian bad poets, Count Dmitry Khvostov. This book received a 2018 Marc Raeff’s Book Prize of the Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association.

Event Video