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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Tatiana Krasil’nikova, “The Letter Materialized: Feminist Strategies in Russian Avant-Garde Visual Poetry“
• Stephanie Sandler, “Picturing Performance: Ry Nikonova’s ‘Genetic Chains of Poetry’“

4:30 – 6:00pm | Panel 4: Circulation: Synthetic Forms in Public Space

• 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“