Dean of the College Presents
Olga Voronina, Assistant Professor of Russian
"A Poet on the Altar: Pushkin Museums and the Evolution of Russia's Model of Literary Memorialization"
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Olin Humanities, Room 102
7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Pushkin literary museums occupy the focal place in Russian culture. With more than twenty memorial sites affirming the poet’s “eternal” presence among the urban landmarks of St. Petersburg and Moscow and beyond, from Pskov to Nizhny Novgorod, and from Orenburg to Tver’, Russia’s cultural memory is predicated on the idea that Pushkin is central not only to the nation’s literature, but also to its rituals of commemoration and worship. The recognition of Pushkin’s supremacy among other Russian writers gives an air of timelessness to museum projects conceived in his name, while the paradigm of immortality associated with Pushkin’s martyrly death contributes to their construction as sacred spaces of memory. This talk demonstrates the influence of Pushkin museums on the formation of Russia’s “sacral” model of literary memorialization and explores how the first public initiative to canonize Pushkin as the national poet evolved into the paradigm of a state-controlled, immobile literary memorial, encapsulated in space and frozen in time. 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for a reception prior to the event beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the Olin Atrium
For more information, call 845-758-7421, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102