Sergei Shnurov and His Group ‘Leningrad’: A Window to Russian Rock Music

Please join us for a talk with Dragan Kujundžić (University of Florida) about Sergei Shnurov’s rock group Leningrad.

In 2016, Sergei Shnurov and his group Leningrad released two now-famous video clips, “Exponat” and “V Pitere pit’”, which were viewed almost 200 million times in 2016. This occasioned an opportunity for Professor Kujundžić to meet with Sergei Shnurov in St. Petersburg in December of 2016. Kujundžić and Shnurov talked about the literary tradition of St. Petersburg, as well as its art and history, as they inform the poetry and music of the rock group Leningrad.

Dragan Kujundžić is a Professor of Jewish, Germanic and Slavic Studies as well as Film and Media Studies, European Studies, and Religion at the University of Florida. He is the author of over 140 articles on critical theory, deconstruction and literary criticism, published in fifteen countries and translated in eight languages. His publications include the monographs Critical Exercises (1983), The Returns of History (1997), Tongue in Heat (2003), and Out of Interculturality (2016). He has edited numerous volumes, including works on Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miler. In recent years, Dragan Kujundžić has started producing and directing documentary films, together with critical and theoretical works related to them. Among his films are The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller (2011) and Cinemuse: Selfie with Sokurov (2015), which premiered at the Message to Man International Film Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. Dragan Kujundžić is currently concluding a book Cinetaph: Spectral Genealogy of Cinematic Image, and filming Play It Again: Sam Weber.