As Angela Brintlinger reminds us, food and foodways offers new opportunities for asking why, for exploring what influences and shapes Russian culture, including everything from religious practices, philosophies of life, literature, art and music to weather conditions, development and infrastructure issues, and social relations.
Naomi Caffee and Collen Lucey share explore the topic of food, a perennial student favorite. After slaving away all semester on case endings and the nuances of verbal aspect, students are usually thrilled to enter the world of pirozhki, borscht, samovars, sukhariki, and sweets from the Red October chocolate factory. Food, together with the customs of hospitality and togetherness that characterize Russian and Eurasian cultures, presents language learners with a topic that feeds the body and soul as well as the mind.
It’s a question Cecil Leigh Wilson gets least once every time ze teaches introductory Russian, or talks about Russian in hir community of nonbinary English-speakers, or discloses this part of hir identity to a Russian-speaker.
This is the introduction to a SEEB series organized by Ani Kokobobo, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Kansas.
A funny thing happened to Eliot Borenstein while he was writing his book on conspiracy theory and contemporary Russia: my obscure little corner of Russian cultural studies suddenly threatened to become relevant.
Preparing 21st-century learners with the skills to use Russian in a variety of social and rhetorical settings in which they can communicate meaning effectively requires a self study of existing language programs. Thomas Jesús Garza shares his methods.
Anne Lounsbery offers some tips for reading and teaching Chekhov in an era marked by moral catastrophe.
Except Princess Olga, Elizabeth, and Catherine II, there were few women discussed in the Russian civilization and culture course that Rachel Stauffer taught. There was little discussion of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class in Russia’s artistic, literary, and cultural history. In light of recent events, she has decided that she can no longer continue to teach this course without devoting more time to these topics.
Rather than reading the poetry of Anna Akhmatova as discrete entities, Sarah Krive shares her experience reading them as they once were, situated in journals, newspapers, and small anthologies of their original publication. She wants to see how they appeared on the page, what other texts and images surrounded them. Remediating is a way of trying to understand, in part, “crucial cultural information about how different components of the periodical’s readership were intended to interact with its content.”
Cassio de Oliveira introduces us to the readership of the Soviet magazine 30 Days (30 dnei, 1925-1941). Better known nowadays for having been the venue for the publication in installments of Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov’s famous novels The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf (Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev and Zolotoi telenok, published in 1928 and 1931 respectively), 30 Days also holds a unique place in the Soviet publishing environment between the NEP Era and the First Five-Year Plan.