Russian and East European Studies
Monday, November 4, 2024 - 12:00pm
Cherpack Lounge, Williams Hall 543
a Master Class with Dr. Mark Lipovetsky
The Trickster and Cynicism
Monday, November 4, 12-2pm, in Cherpak Lounge (Williams Hall, rm. 543, right from the elevators on the fifth floor)
Mark Lipovetsky is finishing a new book on Soviet tricksters. He treats these characters – rogues, jesters, crooks and transgressors – as messengers and embodiments of the less visible side of Soviet modernity, subversive and cynical. He explores how the representation of tricksters in Soviet and post-Soviet culture has facilitated counter-narratives of Soviet modernity. What subjectivities did this alternative narrative produce? How did trickster narratives transform ubiquitous Soviet cynicism into a source of vitality and resistance? What were the cultural effects of the Soviet trickster? Why were these characters so popular?
IMPORTANT: All participants are expected to read distributed materials in advance of the meeting.
Materials:
MARK LIPOVETSKY is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. His research interests include Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Soviet literary and cinematic tricksters, and Soviet underground culture, as well as various aspects of post-Soviet culture. He is the author of twelve monographs and two hundred articles. He is one of the coauthors of the Oxford history of Russian literature (2018). In 2022, Lipovetsky published the monograph A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (co-authored with Ilya Kukulin); he also curated the publication of Prigov’s five-volume collected works at NLO Press in Moscow. He has also co-edited twenty collections of articles on Russian literature and culture of the 20th-21st centuries, including volumes on Dmitry Prigov, Vladimir Sorokin, Vladimir Sharov, and the Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2024). Lipovetsky is a recipient of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages award for outstanding contribution to scholarship (2014) and the Andrey Belyi Prize (2019). At Columbia University, Lipovetsky runs the Contemporary Culture Series that includes talks, conversations, symposia, and conferences on most significant aspects of contemporary Russophone culture. Most recent conferences: Blind Spots of the Counter-Canon: Soviet Underground Culture Revisited (2023) and Criminalized Again: Criminalized Again: Culture(s) of LGBTQIA+ in Search of Freedom (2024). Together with Serguei Oushakine (Princeton) he coordinates the series of workshops L50: the Last 50 years of Russophone Culture and Archaists and Innovators: Re-Reading Viktor Shklovsky.
