Берлинск: Другой город, другая жизнь. Белорусское современное искусство: миграция в Берлин, 2020–2023

This article delves into the complex interplay between lan-guage and identity within the Belarusian artistic diaspora in Berlin starting from the founding of the Belarusian Peo-ple’s Republic throughout its present-day consolidation. By emphasizing the role of individual agency, personal expe-riences, and cultural dynamics, this study accentuates the fluidity and intricacy inherent in diasporic identities.Настоящая статья исследует сложное взаимодействие между языком и идентичностью в белорусской худо-жественной диаспоре Берлина, начиная с основания Белорусской Народной Республики и до современной консолидации. Выделяя роль индивидуальной агентив-ности, личного опыта и культурной динамики, это исследование подчеркивает непосто

The Code of Presence: Belarusian Protest Embroideries and Textile Patterns: Exhibition Report

Since the fraudulent presidential elections of 9 August 2020, the Republic of Belarus has become a battleground between the women-led democratic opposition forces and the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenka. Current forms of political oppression in Belarus make open public protest dangerous. This exhibition report highlights safer ways to express dissent in a dictatorial society by grounding it in the textile arts, collective labor, and participatory practices. “The Code of Presence: Belarusian Protest Embroideries and Textile Patterns” is a permanent digital exhibition that I curated in 2022 hosted by the University of Michigan Library. The exhibition features 12 textile projects created by professional female artists from Belarus, including the works of Rufina Bazlova, Masha Maroz, Varvara Sudnik, Anna Bundeleva, Nasta Vasiuchenka, Lesia Pcholka, Vasilisa Palianina, Dasha Sazanovich, Yuliya Tsviatkova and Da(r)sha Golova. The exhibition explores how Craftivism, a global trend in contemporary art associated with political activism, correlates with the artists’ perceptions of the country’s textile heritage. The purpose of this report is to introduce individual artists, their voices and projects. It is grouped into three distinct, albeit overlapping, categories: 1) individual craftivist strategies in Belarusian protest embroideries; 2) collective craftivist embroidery practices; and 3) traditional textile patterns in other media. Galvanized by the protests of 2020–2021, political artists’ embroideries and ornamental graphics emerged as a protest ritual of a new kind, igniting a powerful process of cultural heritage revitalization, and documenting the events of the protests, working with such themes as feminism, female labor, memory, and trauma

Русский язык в мультилингвальной Калифорнии

Peer reviewe

Domestication of Russian Cuisine in the United States: Wanda L Frolov’s Katish: Our Russian Cook (1947)

This article examines Wanda L Frolov’s cookbook, Katish: Our Russian Cook (1947) as a transitional text that navigates the food diplomacy of World War II and the Cold War “Red Scare.” The book narrates the story of two women from different parts of the world and walks of life – an American widow and a refugee widow from Russia – who lived together in Southern California during Prohibition. The plot is presented through the point-of-view of one of the characters, Sis, as she recounts her childhood memories, while recipes come in clusters triggered by specific vignettes. Using irony, exoticisms, and literary and cultural allusions, the cookbook embodies the journey of the Russian character from her home country to the United States through American recipes. In Katish: Our Russian Cook, Frolov created an original character who asserts herself in the female space of the kitchen while adjusting to a new country. This adjustment is reflected in the hybrid Russian–American menu, which represents a radical departure from the three decades worth of auto-ethnographic cookbooks produced by the white émigrés in the United States. Frolov’s mode of representation of the Russian identity is fused with consumer potential as a positive force, while the child’s eye view of the story obfuscates the refugee trauma narrative. Released before the advent of television cooking shows and food editor conferences, Katish: Our Russian Cook mapped the local Los Angeles culinary scene in the 1920s and contributed to the development of the culinary memoir writing genre. Published first during the Cold War and republished by Ruth Reichl in 2001, it serves as a pertinent example of American integration and domestication of Russianness

"We Were the River": Screenwriters of the Left Front of the Arts, 1923–1931

In 1923, the preeminent Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky gathered the main forces of the Soviet avant-garde under the umbrella of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) and its two journals, LEF (1923–1925) and Novyi LEF (1927–1928). This dissertation examines the contribution of LEF’s screenwriters to the film industry in the 1920s and early 1930s by focusing on the screenwriting oeuvre of the journals’ editors—Osip Brik, Sergei Tretiakov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Part and parcel of a larger discussion about the role of screenplays in Soviet film studies, LEF’s screenwriting remains one of the most obscure aspects of the group’s engagement with cinema. The central argument of this thesis elaborates the view that these authors’ film-works had a closer connection to the group’s ethos than previously understood. My analyses rely on the examination of Brik, Tretiakov, and Mayakovsky’s screen ideas alongside relevant theoretical articles, extant film footage, archival sources, historical cine-press publications, and personal memoirs. The findings of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the group’s screenwriting theory and praxis.This dissertation is organized into four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The introduction delineates the research nexus, followed by chapter 1 that discusses the operational definition of LEF and traces the diachronic development of its engagement with the cine-medium. Chapter 2 uncovers links between LEF’s project and Osip Brik’s film-works and analyzes his authorship model through Viktor Shklovsky’s paradigm of literaturnaia podenshchina (daily literary labor). Chapter 3 demonstrates how Sergei Tretiakov’s idea of production screenplay was implemented in the corpus of his Georgian films. It also discusses Tretiakov’s authorship model through the concept of operative author, as theorized by Walter Benjamin. Chapter 4 evaluates Vladimir Mayakovsky’s screenplays written during the LEF period by drawing out their auteur features and juxtaposing them against the broader scope of the group’s film-works. By charting LEF’s contribution to cinema via categories of production principles, ideology, innovation, and authorship models, this dissertation advances a comprehensive view of the group’s participation in cinema. It contributes to the interdisciplinary field of avant-garde studies, as well as to the scholarship on Soviet cinema of the silent era