It Will Be Fun and Terrifying: Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia

The National Bolshevik Party, founded in the mid-1990s by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, began as an attempt to combine radically different ideologies. In the years that followed, Limonov, Dugin, and the movements they led underwent dramatic shifts. The two leaders eventually became political adversaries, with Dugin and his organizations strongly supporting Putin’s regime while Limonov and his groups became…

Yiddish Children’s Literature Today

The Jewish children’s literature field is booming and the call to provide representation of Jewish children, for Jewish children, has played a large part in that. The publication of Miriam Udel’s new book of translated Yiddish children’s literature, Honey on the Page, is the perfect opportunity to celebrate the history of Yiddish children’s literature, and to examine the roles it…

Book Club on Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education

Join us for a lively Zoom conversation on Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, translated from the French by Robert Baldick (Penguin). Based on Flaubert’s own youthful passion for an older woman, Sentimental Education was described by its author as “the moral history of the men of my generation.” It follows the amorous adventures of Frederic Moreau, a law student who, returning…

Roy Foster “On Seamus Heaney”

Oct, 14th, 12.30pm EST/5.30pm GMT Presented in collaboration with The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities. Join us for an online conversion with Professor Roy Foster about his new book, On Seamus Heaney (Princeton University Press, 2020). Published this fall, On Seamus Heaney is a vivid and original account of one of Ireland’s greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer. Professor Foster will…

Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader

Derek Penslar will discuss his book Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader with Jonathan Gribetz. About the Book The life of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete,…

VIRTUAL EVENT. Burning Books: Akram Aylisli, Literature, and Human Rights in Today’s Azerbaijan

Register here for the Zoom webinar or tune in on YouTube Live. Please join the Harriman Institute and PEN America for a discussion with Akram Aylisli, author of Farewell Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works (Academic Studies Press, 2018), translator Katherine E. Young, and journalist Alex Raufoglu. Moderated by Professor Mark Lipovetsky. This event is part of our Contemporary Culture Series. The three novellas…

Ode to the Hybrid: Writing as a Russian-American

Olga Livshin is an English-language poet of Jewish descent, via Russia and Ukraine. The Los Angeles Review of Books described her 2019 book as follows: “In her inventive collection of ‘poems with translations,’ A Life Replaced, … Livshin writes in conversation with Akhmatova, using the older poet’s grief as a guide to navigate the depressing present.” In conversation with Eliot Borenstein, Livshin will discuss…

On Les Inséparables, Simone de Beauvoir’s Unpublished Novel

Join professor and publisher Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir along with author and New Yorker  staff writer Judith Thurman and as they discuss Les Inséparables, a novel by Simone de Beauvoir written in 1954 and released for the first time this fall. In her memoir Force of Circumstance, de Beauvoir mentioned that she gave the manuscript of Les Inséparables to…

Faroese Authors You Should Know

Online

Scandinavia House continues its series, Nordic Authors You Should Know--this time with a focus on literature from the Faroe Islands. Join this lecture and discussion featuring Rakel Helmsdal, Carl Johan Jensen, and Marjun Syberdo Kjaelnes. The event will begin with short readings of each of the author's work in both the original language and in English, followed by interviews with the authors and…

Three Rings: An Evening with Daniel Mendelsohn

Join best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn as he presents his latest book Three Rings, just published by University of Virginia Press, over Zoom. Combining memoir, biography, fiction, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the very…