The California Graduate Slavic Colloquium 2026

The California Graduate Slavic Colloquium 2026 is generously supported by the UCSB Graduate Student Association, the UCSB Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, the UCSB Graduate Center for Literary Research, the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the UCSB Comparative Literature Program

Colloquium Schedule

Friday, April 17, 2026

McCune Conference Room | HSSB 6020

7:00 pm: All the Frost Melts. A Trilingual Reading in Dolgan, Russian and English with Ksenia Bolshakova, Karina Sheifer and Ainsley Morse

Saturday, April 18, 2026

McCune Conference Room | HSSB 6020

8:00 am: Coffee and Breakfast
8:45 am: Opening Remarks
9:00 am: Panel 1: Intermediality and Self-Referentiality
10:30 am: Coffee Break
10:45 am: Panel 2: Film and the Limits of the Soviet Cosmopolis
12:15 pm: Lunch
1:00 pm: Panel 3: Writing the Self
2:30 pm: Coffee Break
2:45 pm: Panel 4: Transnational Transformations
4:15 pm: Coffee Break
4:30 pm: Panel 5: Remember, Refuse, Remain, Resist
6:00 pm: Closing Remarks
7:00 pm: Social Gathering for Participants

Panels

9:00 am – 10:30 am | Panel 1
Intermediality and Self-Referentiality

Chair: Roman Koropecky (UCLA)

Elizabeth Crim (Stanford University)
Composing Modernity: Nietzsche, Musical Ekphrasis, and Feminist Nationalism in Kobylianska’s "Valse Mélancolique" and "Impromptu Fantasie"

Petr Lobanov (University of Southern California)
Minus-Literature: Metaliterary Code and Institutional Exclusion in the Prose of Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky

Anna Schewelew (UC Santa Barbara)
Avant-garde in Stalinabad: Theater in Rafail Perelshteyn’s I Met a Girl.

10:30 am – 10:45 | Coffee Break

10:45 am – 12:15 pm | Panel 2
Film and the Limits of the Soviet Cosmopolis

Chair: Elena Weygandt (UC Santa Barbara)

Pavel Savgira (UC Los Angeles)
Revisiting the Humor of the Czech New Wave

Cristina Dinu (UC San Diego)
Bureaucratic Afterlives: Institutional Continuity and the Comedy of Survival in Socialist and Post-Socialist Cinema

Chengfan Zhou (UC San Diego)
“Beware! Maoism!”: Medvedkin’s Critique of Maoist China and its Counter-Reception by the Western Radical Left

12:15 pm – 1:00pm | Lunch

1:00 pm – 2:30 pm | Panel 3
Writing the Self

Chair: Venya Gushchin (University of Southern California)

Nina Gopaldas (UC Berkeley)
Address, Apostrophe, and Autocommunication in Vasily Zhukovsky and Masha Protasova’s Pis’ma-Dnevniki

Alexandra Noi (UC Santa Barbara)
Performing Ideas of Human Plasticity in the Gulag Camps

Julie Ammons (University of Southern California)
Rewriting Pushkin and the Self: Dovlatov’s Pushkin Hills and Counter-History

2:30 pm – 2:45pm | Coffee Break

2:45 pm – 4:15 pm | Panel 4
Transnational Transformations

Chair: Dominick Lawton (Stanford)

Shudi Yang (UC Berkeley)
Time(s) to Cry: Elegiac Temporalities from Derzhavin’s fall to Zhukovsky’s flow’

Annabel Hou (UC Berkeley)
The “Ordo Inversus”, or Echoes of Novalis in Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik

Elena Makarova (UC Los Angeles)
The 19th-Century Critical Reception of Ivan Turgenev: Perspectives of T.S. Perry and W.D. Howells

4:15 pm – 4:30 pm | Coffee Break

4:30 pm – 6:00 pm | Panel 5
Remember, Refuse, Remain, Resist

Chair: Ainsley Morse (UC San Diego)

Cooper Lynn (UC Los Angeles)
Generation Trouble: Polish Romantics Remember the Koliszczyzna

Mahshid Hosseinian (University of Southern California)
The Dog as a Critical Literary Figure of Authoritarian Modernism in the Soviet Union and Iran

Una Vulević (Stanford University)
The Poetics of Retracing: Walking, Urban Space, and Jewish Memory in The Book of Blam

Abstracts

9:00 am – 10:30 am | Panel 1
Intermediality and Self-Referentiality
Chair: Roman Koropecky (UCLA)

Elizabeth Crim (Stanford University)
Composing Modernity: Nietzsche, Musical Ekphrasis, and Feminist Nationalism in Kobylianska’s "Valse Mélancolique" and "Impromptu Fantasie"
This essay examines the intersection of Nietzschean philosophy and musical ekphrasis in Olha Kobylianska’s short stories "Valse Mélancolique" (1898) and "Impromptu Fantasie" (1898). I propose analyzing the narrative structure of the two novellas as shaped by musical forms. The former is structured as a three-count waltz, and the latter as an improvisatory impromptu. Kobylianska integrates musical techniques into prose through staccato-like dialogue, fermata-like ellipses, and paragraph breaks that function as rhythmic pauses. Using digital text analysis, such as Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org), and Excel spreadsheet-based graphing, this essay demonstrates that these formal strategies align with moments of emotional intensity. Additionally, I argue that Kobylianska’s stories are in opposition to late 19th-century populist ideology. Kobylianska believed that these ideas were too radical for the real-life conditions of Ukrainians and, particularly, Ukrainian women. In opposing populism, she adapts Friedrich Nietzsche’s model of artistic harmony between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as well as his concept of the Übermensch. Kobylianska's use of musical ekphrasis allows her to translate Nietzsche's philosophy into a distinctly feminist, national vision of Ukraine’s future. By composing her stories according to the principles of music, she reimagines Ukraine as a modern society grounded in harmony, connection, and aesthetic balance rather than populism.

Petr Lobanov (University of Southern California)
Minus-Literature: Metaliterary Code and Institutional Exclusion in the Prose of Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky
Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky wrote actively in Soviet Moscow, but published fewer than ten texts during his lifetime. In this paper, I examine how Krzhizhanovsky’s marginal position shaped the poetics of his prose. Using Roland Barthes' concept of codes as an analytical framework, the paper examines four prose texts: "A Page of History" (1922), "Autobiography of a Corpse" (1925), "Stamp: Moscow" (1925), and "The Club of Letter Killers" (1926). The analysis demonstrates how recurring metaliterary codes systematically supplant mimetic narration with reflection on writing as a material and autonomous process. In these texts, the subject is reduced to an element of writing, textual metaphors are literalized, and letters and words acquire agency independent of the author. To describe this type of writing, I suggest the concept of "minus-literature"—writing that functions outside the institutional channels of publication, circulation, and reader perception and is therefore oriented toward its own material conditions: letters, paper, the act of writing itself. In conditions of such communicative isolation, literary texts cannot sustain themselves primarily as representations of the external world. Instead, metaliterature emerges not simply as an aesthetic strategy or metafictional play, but as a structural response conditioned by exclusion from the literary field.

Anna Schewelew (UC Santa Barbara)
Avant-garde in Stalinabad: Theater in Rafail Perelshteyn’s I Met a Girl.
Rafail Perelshteyn’s 1957 musical comedy I Met a Girl was one of the most successful films produced by Tajikfilm. It follows the rehearsal of a musical play by enthusiastic amateurs who collectively work to persuade a conservative Tajik father to let his talented daughter perform on stage. Usually considered a prime example of run-of-the-mill late-Stalinist aesthetics, I Met a Girl adheres to the main principles of Socialist Realism. In this paper I argue that while I Met a Girl as a film is formally and narratively quite conventional, its portrayal of the theater as a space of self-reflection is very much indebted to avant-garde theater. In a close reading of the film’s theater scenes, I show how it echoes ideas of actor-spectator interaction formulated by Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, Asja Lacis and Walter Benjamin. Without actually showing avant-garde theater, the film stages a disturbance of the amateur play by using stage techniques associated with avant-garde theater like the breaking of the fourth wall and blurring of the distinction between the stage and the audience. Drawing on Boris Groys’ work on socialist-realism, I argue that I Met a Girl merges socialist-realist and avant-garde aesthetics to advocate for art’s ability to change the minds of individuals and the life of communities. At the same time, the juxtaposition of theater and film subtly points to the limitations of both art forms’ potential to effect social change.

10:45 am – 12:15 pm | Panel 2
Film at the Limits of the Soviet Cosmopolis
Chair: Elena Weygandt (UC Santa Barbara)

Pavel Savgira (UC Los Angeles)
Revisiting the Humor of the Czech New Wave
Despite the prevalence of humor in the films of the Czech New Wave, it remains largely overlooked by scholarship. Focusing on The Report on the Party and its Guests (Jan Němec, 1966) and The Joke (Jaromil Jireš, released in 1969; made in 1967-68), this paper investigates the central role of the comedic mode in the critique of Soviet imperialism and the engagement of the liberatory politics of 1968. I argue that humor allows these films to critically engage both, “the most exciting political development of the generation” (Jonathan Bolton)—the Prague Spring reforms—and the terror of past repression, while staking a clear opening in the present. A thorough account of the comedic ambiguities allows us to revisit these films without reducing their politics to, as director Pavel Juráček satirically put it, “Kennedy’s cultural offensive,” or a failed parting with communism that would have to wait until 1989. Instead, I position them at the forefront of non-aligned cultural imaginaries of the 1960s that used humor to engage contradictory realities and signal the immediate proximity of alternative societal configurations.

Cristina Dinu (UC San Diego)
Bureaucratic Afterlives: Institutional Continuity and the Comedy of Survival in Socialist and Post-Socialist Cinema
This paper argues that several films about socialism and post-socialism use deadpan humor and institutional absurdity to reveal the persistence of bureaucratic power across political systems. Focusing on the Romanian films The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) and 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006), it examines how post-communist democracy is portrayed not as a clean rupture with the past but as a system in which many procedural logics of late socialism continue to shape everyday life. Hospitals, television studios, and municipal institutions appear formally democratic yet operate through familiar delays, rituals, and administrative indifference.
To clarify this continuity, the Romanian films are placed in dialogue with Karen Shakhnazarov’s late-Soviet filmZerograd (1988), which depicts the absurdity of socialist bureaucracy before the collapse of the USSR. While the systems are not identical, the comparison highlights how bureaucratic structures and everyday survival strategies outlive ideological change.
Drawing on Václav Havel’s reflections on the tension between institutional systems and human dignity, the paper describes this aesthetic mode as a “materialist comedy of survival.” By revealing these continuities, the films help explain why dissatisfaction with post-communist institutions can produce nostalgia without themselves being nostalgic.

Chengfan Zhou (UC San Diego)
“Beware! Maoism!”: Medvedkin’s Critique of Maoist China and its Counter-Reception by the Western Radical Left
Over 10 years between 1969 and 1979, Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989) made a series of propagandist documentaries attacking Maoist China. From A Letter to a Chinese Friend (Pis’mo kitaiskomu drugu, 1969), Night Over China(Noch’ nad Kitaem, 1971), to Truth and Slander (Pravda i nepravda, 1975), Medvedkin puts forward his own analysis of Maoism through documentaries, highlighting the dire consequences of Mao’s Anti-Soviet policies, which, he believes, drive Chinese people into poverty, famine, and backwardness. Ideologically charged as these documentaries were, Medvedkin was nevertheless committed to his critique of Maoism, within which he found an underlying logic of war that aligned Maoism to Western imperialism and even fascism. However, Medvedkin’s attack on Maoism suffered a counterattack by radical leftists and communists in France and West Germany, among whom “a Maoist fever” was in vogue. Standing his ground, Medvedkin made another documentary, Beware Maoism! (Ostorozhno! Maoizm!, 1979) further explaining his thoughts on the danger of Maoism, especially Mao’s insistence on China developing atomic bombs independently. This paper locates Medvedkin’s series of documentaries on Maoist China within a global network of communist internationalism in the revolutionary 1960s and 70s. The unique genre of documentary, along with its domestic and global circulation, positions it as an effective venue for political analysis and debates. Propagandist and ideologically charged as these documentaries are, Medvedkin nevertheless puts forward an important criticism of the militant and violent elements in Maoism, which ironically inspired socialist movements in capitalist societies like France and West Germany.

1:00 pm – 2:30 pm | Panel 3
Writing the Self
Chair: Venya Gushchin (University of Southern California)

Nina Gopaldas (UC Berkeley)
Address, Apostrophe, and Autocommunication in Vasily Zhukovsky and Masha Protasova’s Pis’ma-Dnevniki
In 1814, Vasily Zhukovsky and Masha Protasova produced their “pis'ma-dnevniki,” letter-diaries that at once address the other and the self. The development of this form arises from their desire to negotiate a continued intimate spiritual relationship in the wake of physical separation. These pis'ma-dnevniki serve as a record of Zhukovsky and Protasova's faith in each other, enacted in text as Zhukovsky requests that Protasova rewrite all that he writes to her, vowing to do the same. Embedded throughout the pis'ma-dnevniki are poems, adapted from Zhukovsky's published works, written by other poets, or original and composed for this correspondence. This paper explores the status of the lyric subject in the pis'ma-dnevniki, focusing on the speaker-addressee dynamics and lyric temporality in the verse elements of the text. This unique hybrid form models a mode of address, fundamental to the lyric, that locates itself in between apostrophe and autocommunication, where the subject directs speech to a distinct Other, while simultaneously manifesting inward speech to the self. Moreover, the correspondence relies on a degree of futurity, on speaking not to the Other of the present, but to an imagined Other-to-be of the future. It is through this complex dynamic of address that Zhukovsky and Protasova continually assert an intimacy of constancy and future-directed faith in each other.

Alexandra Noi (UC Santa Barbara)
Performing Ideas of Human Plasticity in the Gulag Camps
In this paper, I demonstrate how Soviet penal theory and practice of the first half of the 1930s deployed a specific understanding of human nature as plastic and malleable, in line with the ideas of the sciences of “visionary biology” of the 1920s. I investigate how historical actors interpreted scientific ideas about the transformation of human nature and what use they made of those ideas. Methodologically, I attend to Gulag’s own speech about itself (such as the criminal justice publications and labor camp newspapers) as evidence of its efforts to create a specific vision of work and certain kinds of workers. I argue that the adopted approach defined people as pliant and susceptible to be bent into specific form and content. While the specific techniques of perekovka (reforging) varied, they were all built around labor. Gulag’s self-speech demonstrates how scientific ideas about the plasticity of human nature have been “performed” within Soviet carceral spaces.

Julie Ammons (University of Southern California)
Rewriting Pushkin and the Self: Dovlatov’s Pushkin Hills and Counter-History
Sergei Dovlatov’s often autobiographical writing routinely blurs the line between the narrator and the author. This indistinction between fact and fiction is further complicated by Dovlatov’s tendency to revisit scenes from his life in different works, retelling them with varying details and outcomes. In this paper, I focus on Dovlatov’s 1983 novella Pushkin Hills and argue that the author’s playful variations on his own biography are complemented by the text’s irony toward the single Soviet “ideologically appropriate” mode of commemorating Pushkin. I contend that the novella’s play with biographical and autobiographical “facts” problematizes the linear view of history which had been engrained in Soviet ideology and cultural production for decades at the time of the writing of Pushkin Hills. The novella encourages the drawing of parallels between the lives of Dovlatov, the narrator, and Pushkin, highlighting, for instance, all three figures’ fraught relationship with authority and implying a cyclical rather than linear nature of history. At the same time, however, by ironizing how the Pushkin Hills Preserve required tour guides and visitors to recount specific details of Pushkin’s life and by repeatedly rewriting the “facts” of his own biography, Dovlatov emphasizes the implausibility of the existence of any one truthful account of the past, including one’s own.

2:45 pm – 4:15 pm | Panel 4
Transnational Transformations
Chair: Dominick Lawton (Stanford)

Shudi Yang (UC Berkeley)
Time(s) to Cry: Elegiac Temporalities from Derzhavin’s Fall to Zhukovsky’s Flow’
The paper rereads the emergence of elegies at the beginning of the nineteenth century through the lens of temporal imageries. Two representatives of this generic transition, Derzhavin and Zhukovsky, will be examined: it is argued that while being a precursor of historical elegies, the odic verticality - exemplified in ‘водопад’ - persists in Derzhavin; by contrast, a horizontal flow of time can be found in Zhukovsky’s elegies as the underlying support for his work of mourning.

Annabel Hou (UC Berkeley)
The “Ordo Inversus”, or Echoes of Novalis in Dostoevsky’s Dvoinik
The present paper advances a new conceptual and formal framework for understanding the motif of the double in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction-- the schemata of self-reflexivity and doubling developed by Early German Romanticism. I demonstrate how Friedrich von Hardenberg’s (Novalis) concept of the ordo inversus can be used as an aesthetic and moral device to comprehend the problem of identity in Dostoevsky’s second novella, Dvoinik (1846/66); and how the latter intensifies the problem of Romantic self-reflexivity by making his protagonist’s crisis of dual identity at once philosophical, social, and psychological. I argue that Goliadkin’s struggle of and for self-consciousness, knowledge, and freedom arises from his inability to reconcile his rational mind (his egotistical motivations to succeed in the bureaucratic social order, for example) and his more metaphysical endeavors toward a higher morality or purpose. To be sure, throughout the novella he seems intuitively to understand his failure to find the unity of being and reflection that informs both moments of the dynamic between the self and the other. Instead, Goliadkin maintains this dualism as an isolating, even violent, opposition that not only prevents the antagonism between the subjective realm and the objective world from fully dissipating but leads to his tragically forceful excision from the latter altogether.

Elena Makarova (UC Los Angeles)
The 19th-Century Critical Reception of Ivan Turgenev: Perspectives of T.S. Perry and W.D. Howells
This paper explores the early American reception of Ivan Turgenev through the critical perspectives of Thomas Sergeant Perry and William Dean Howells in the 1870s and 1880s. It argues that both critics played a decisive role in establishing Turgenev as a central figure of European realism within U.S. literary culture and in shaping the emergence of similar aesthetics in the United States.
Drawing on Perry’s reviews in The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as his translations of Turgenev’s fiction, the paper demonstrates how Perry framed Turgenev as an “artist in his realism.” He emphasized the novelist’s non-intrusive narration, psychological subtlety, and ability to “recreate” life rather than merely describe it. Perry’s interpretation was informed by evolutionary models of literary progress, influenced by contemporary Darwinian thought, which positioned realism as the most advanced form of modern art.
The second part of the paper examines Howells’s engagement with Turgenev as editor of The Atlantic Monthly and as a novelist. Howells admired Turgenev’s “truth to life,” dramatic construction, and especially his complex female characters, seeing in them an alternative to both British narrative conventions and heavily stylized French fiction. Through reviews of Smoke, Lisa, and Rudin, Howells presented Turgenev as a national writer whose fiction allowed American readers to “Russianize” themselves while reconsidering their own literary identity.
Together, Perry and Howells functioned as cultural mediators who integrated Russian realism into American literary discourse, helping redefine the novel’s artistic and social function in the post–Civil War United States.

4:30 pm – 6:00 pm | Panel 5
Remember, Refuse, Remain, Resist
Chair: Ainsley Morse (UC San Diego)

Cooper Lynn (UC Los Angeles)
Generation Trouble: Polish Romantics Remember the Koliszczyzna
In their seminal study Historia i romantyzm, Maria Janion and Maria Żmigrodska describe the koliszczyzna as an essential event in establishing the Polish romantic worldview. The bloody uprising gave Polish poets an opportunity to reflect on revolution, the nature of history, and the wild spaces of Ukraine. Their writing is not circumscribed to art-for-art’s sake, however, but also contains within it a social imperative: although none of the romantic writers lived through the rebellion, they felt a strong impulse to prevent its passage into obscurity. Notably, koliszczyzna literature tends to over-identify with the narrators and characters of their works, bringing to mind more recent scholarship on postmemory of the Holocaust. Although they have yet to be treated as works of memory, Seweryn Goszczyński’s Zamek Kaniowski, Michał Grabowski’s Koliszczyzna i stepy, and Juliusz Słowacki’s Sen srebrny Salomei (three exemplars of this body of literature) perform many of the functions that memory scholars have identified in the last twenty years as the essential work of memory. Reading them as works of memory offers insight into the birth of a romantic sensibility in East Europe: by writing themselves and their own proclivities and beliefs into the narrative by way of postmemory, they develop what Astrid Erll describes as implicit memory about the koliszczyzna and Ukraine more broadly, ahistorically ascribing a coherent national motivation to the actions of the haidamaks as well as to the Poles who suffered—in other words, they appropriate the history into their own worldview by virtue or remembering it.

Una Vulević (Stanford University)
The Poetics of Retracing: Walking, Urban Space, and Jewish Memory in The Book of Blam
In The Book of Blam (Knjiga o Blamu, 1972), Aleksandar Tišma’s Holocaust novel set in Novi Sad, the catastrophe of European Jewry is confronted through a survivor’s restless movement through his hometown. Miroslav Blam has no God to address and no theological framework capable of helping him cope with what has occurred. Instead, he takes up walking. He returns obsessively to streets, buildings, and squares which once housed Jews, addressing his inarticulate, unanswerable questions to the city’s altered architecture. The city becomes the medium through which the phenomenon of survivor’s guilt is explored.
Tišma represents the Shoah through a belated return to the spaces of his own childhood, using Novi Sad’s familiar streets and buildings as a framework for recalling and reimagining events that he only partially understood at the time. Drawing selectively on Yuri Lotman’s concept of artistic space and on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between official versus practiced space, I show how Blam’s repeated walks through the city produce meaning where speech and theology fail. Streets, buildings, and interiors become sites of return and resistance, where past and present collide and where survival registers as deferred reckoning. Through close readings of three settings, I trace how Blam’s wandering reflects a wider post-Shoah condition of Jewish survival, marked by an ongoing struggle over visibility and belonging.

Mahshid Hosseinian (University of Southern California)
The Dog as a Critical Literary Figure of Authoritarian Modernism in the Soviet Union and Iran
Modernity is commonly understood as one of the most fundamental transformations in the history of human thought and social organization, reshaping not only modes of life but also how individuals understand themselves and the world around them. Rationality, science, progress, and individualism emerged as the central values of this project of modernization (Weber 1978, 24–26). Yet the historical experience of the twentieth century revealed a deep internal contradiction within modernity itself: the same rational and scientific forces that promised emancipation became instruments of domination and exclusion. In societies that experienced accelerated or authoritarian modernization, literature became a privileged site for registering and critiquing this contradiction. Early twentieth-century Soviet literature, shaped by ideology, and social engineering, and Persian literature of the Pahlavi period, produced within a state-led and coercive modernization project, both responded critically to forms of modernity imposed from above. This article offers a comparative reading of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (1925) and Sadegh Hedayat’s “The Stray Dog” (1942) to examine literary responses to authoritarian modernization in these two culturally different countries. It argues that both texts expose a fundamental disjunction between administrative or infrastructural modernity and ethical modernity. In each work, the dog functions as a liminal figure whose difference is not tolerated. Drawing on John Berger’s notion of animals as bearers of a “parallel life,” the article reads Sharik and Pat not as passive objects of power but as critical figures through whom the ethical impoverishment of modern social orders becomes visible. Bulgakov’s novella critiques the Soviet project of engineering the “New Man,” revealing greater ethical coherence in Sharik’s animal state than in his grotesque transformation into Sharikov. Hedayat’s story similarly positions the stray dog as an ethical counter-model, expelled from both traditional and modern Iranian society. Read together, these texts reveal the dog as a transnational figure that renders the ethical violence of authoritarian modernity legible.

Colloquium Schedule