50th Jubilee

The Russian Major

at The University of Montana

April 21st and 22nd, 2017

Opening Reception and Keynote SpeechFriday, April 21st from 7:00-9:00 pm. The President’s Room of Brantley Hall.7:00 Gathering7:15 Welcome & Introductions Keynote speech: “Now and Then: What endures (in Russian culture)” by Dr. Tom Seifrid8:00 Cake break! (gluten-free alternative: French macaroons) 8:15 Champagne toast in honor of our program and its past faculty members 8:30 Student awards and honors 8:40 First-year language tradition: “Людоед и принцесса” performed by Ethan Holmes8:45 Vocal performances “Tatyana’s Letter” from Eugene Onegin ………………………………Tchaikovsky Claire Robertson, Soprano Scott Koljonen, Accompanist“Lilacs” and “Spring Waters”…………………………………………………Rachmaninov Holly Jacobs, Soprano Scott Koljonen, Accompanist

SATURDAY, APRIL 22nd Native American Center, room 105

10:00-12:00pm: POPULATIONS AND POLICY Chair: Robert Greene, Associate Professor

“Industry and the Indigenous: the Case of the Yamal Nenets and Hydrocarbon Extraction”

Ethan McKown

(MA candidate in Global Environmental Policy at American University)

“A Problem Definition Approach to the Conservation of the Lion in Tanzania and Amur Tiger in Russia”

Travis Vincent

(MA candidate at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University)

"The Bumpy Road to Democracy: Success and Failure in the Integration of Ethnic Armenians in the Republic of Georgia"

Greta Starrett

(MA in International Studies from the University of Washington)

“Between Wartime Atrocity and the Genocide of the Jews: Early Soviet Representations of the Nazi Death Camps and Polish Responses, 1944-1946”

Alana Holland

(PhD candidate in Modern Russian and East European History at the University of Kansas)

1:30-3:30 pm: LITERATURE & FILMChair: Clint Walker, Associate Professor

“History as Motion: Time, Memory, and the Modern Jewish Experience in Jabotinsky’s Pyatero and Bergelson’s Nokh Alemen”

Tyler Dolan

(PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at

the University of Illinois)

“Anatolii Lunacharskii and the Soviet Theater”

John Dunkum

(MA in History from University of Montana)

“ ‘Yesterday I was still a fool, but today I’m a bit wiser’: Reading Dostoevsky in Contemporary America”

Justin Trifiro

(PhD candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at

The University of Southern California)

“Upstaging the Carnival:A Bakhtinian Take on Necrorealist Biopolitics”

Ellina Sattarova

(PhD candidate in Film Studies with a concentration in Slavic at

the University of Pittsburgh)

ABSTRACTS

“Industry and the Indigenous: the Case of the Yamal Nenets and Hydrocarbon Extraction” (Ethan McKown)

There has been a Russian presence in the arctic for centuries. The presence adopted a different tone and nuance, however, following the discovery of valuable hydrocarbons such as oil, natural gas, and coal. Inevitably, the extraction of natural resources from the tundra has impacted the local environment – ecologically, socio-politically, economically, and culturally. This paper examines the Russian extractive industry’s impact on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, home to the indigenous Nenets reindeer herders. To more fully understand the impacts of the extractive industry on a group of arctic indigenous peoples, this paper explores the relationship through three different lenses focused on the two present groups of Yamal inhabitants – the Nenets and Russians. The first lens, political ecology, investigates the socio-political and cultural ties that the two groups bear towards the environment. The second lens, economics, examines the groups’ relationship to markets, both to reindeer and to the extracted resource, local and global. The third lens, science, provides a review of scientific literature that helps answer what physical impacts the extractive industry has on the surrounding environment. Ultimately, the paper concludes that the Russian impact on the environment has greatly changed indigenous dynamics in the region. However, the relationship between the Russians, Nenets, and their environment is complex, and does not fit the common colonial narrative. The future of the region is uncertain, dependent on the state of the Russian economy, Russian geopolitical interests, the resilience of the Nenets, and, of course, climate change.

“A Problem Definition Approach to the Conservation of the Lion in Tanzania and Amur Tiger in Russia” (Travis Vincent)

Despite growing efforts and varied approaches to protect large cat species, populations have continued to decline at a rapid rate. Conservationists must incorporate social, political, managerial, and economic values into their strategies in order to correct this trend (Clark, 1992; Dickman, Hazzah, Carbone, & Durant, 2014). A policy sciences approach provides just such a framework that allows for the identification of existing policies and potential policy decisions, taking into account relevant participants, values, perspectives, and sources of information (Primm & Clark, 1996). The following paper defines conservation policy problems for large cats globally and in middle and developing countries specifically using this framework. To ensure the global nature of the study, the African lion in Tanzania and the Amur tiger (often called the Siberian tiger) in Russia were chosen as subjects. The results showed that in the cases of the African lion and the Amur tiger, threats were similar – illegal killing, encroachment, connectivity, and enforcement, yet the policy recommendations are dissimilar. Tiger conservation should focus on increasing and improving anti-poaching measures and habitat protection, while lion conservation should develop buffer zones and create increase local value for lions. Globally, increasing tolerance for large cats and halting the legal and illegal trade of large cats is vital.

"The Bumpy Road to Democracy: Success and Failure in the Integration of Ethnic Armenians in the Republic of Georgia" (Greta Starrett)

After the chaos that ensued during the 1990s, Mikheil Saakashvili came to power in 2003 seeking to rebuild Georgia into a functioning, unified state. One of the ways he tried to do this was through the integration of national minorities into Georgian mainstream society. Significant research has been done on his integration efforts with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but much less has been done about his efforts with the Armenians of Samtskhe-Javakheti. This paper begins by setting the stage for Saakashvili by looking at the actions of his predecessors and how they influenced the Samtskhe-Javakheti region of Georgia. The second section provides a brief examination of important Georgian laws that will provide the framework for what Georgia has sought to achieve since independence regarding its ethnic minorities. The third section of the paper explores what integrations means and examines specific actions that the Saakashvili administration took in this region looking at education, language, civic participation, and

infrastructure rehabilitation. The fourth assesses the impact of Saakashvili’s actions – where he had success and where he had failure. The fifth and final section explores why the Saakashvili administration got the results it did and what Saakashvili’s legacy is today."

“Between Wartime Atrocity and the Genocide of the Jews: Early Soviet Representations of the Nazi Death Camps and Polish Responses, 1944-1946” (Alana Holland)

Before and during World War Two, the Jewish Soviet-Ukrainian artist Zinoviy Tolkachov was praised throughout the Soviet Union. By 1949 the Soviet state had rendered him disgraced and took measures to ensure that his name remained in the shadows. He was the first Soviet artist to officially depict the Nazi death and concentration camps in Poland in painting/drawing. I argue that Tolkachov – a figure of the Ukrainian Jewish past whose name should be retrieved from an imposed obscurity – occupied a crucial position negotiating Polish and Soviet interests for representing the war during the precarious years of 1944-1946. Tolkachov departed from Soviet political norms and depicted the inherently Jewish nature of the Holocaust, while depicting Polish suffering more generally. In analyzing local responses to his work at public exhibitions throughout Poland, I conclude that some Poles immediately sensed the inherently Jewish nature of the Holocaust but resented the fact that this seemingly overshadowed ethnically Polish suffering in the war. The responses elucidate early attempts to reframe wartime suffering in ethnically Polish terms in the immediate post-liberation period. They also show how everyday people responded to the Holocaust and thus helped determine its future interpretation in Poland and Eastern Europe. Additionally, rather than viewing the Soviet Union as a monolithically antisemitic regime that downplayed Jewish suffering in the Holocaust at all times, Tolkachov’s exhibitions show the ambivalent Soviet stance on the “Jewish question” in the immediate post-liberation period. Tolkachov provided a link for understanding the interplay of official versus ordinary citizens’ responses to the Holocaust in the aftermath of WWII.

“History as Motion: Time, Memory, and the Modern Jewish Experience in Jabotinsky’s Pyatero and Bergelson’s Nokh Alemen” (Tyler Dolan)

French philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1896 Matter and Memory demanded a revolutionary change in the conceptualization of the act of remembering; perception, for Bergson, is defined as “an occasion for remembering,” and the relationship between perception and memory is crucial to the defining of either term. Bergson importantly complicates his own theses on the interrelatedness of action and memory and distinguishes between two forms of memory: “true” memory, or memory par excellence - specific memory-contexts that exist in specific times- and habit informed by memory - rote actions that escape time like turning a doorknob or walking a repeated and well-worn path. Layered onto a literary context, we can imagine these concepts to mean that a character is capable of moving through the world through a series of repetitive motions by accessing this secondary “rote” memory alone. However, without an ability to call upon and interpret “true” memory, be it personal or cultural, characters’ actions become jerky and cyclical - they begin to behave as automatons, a major trope of modernist critique. Bergson’s core understanding of the interpenetration of perception and memory, extrapolated to include all-important cultural memory, changes the way we imagine the crises of Jewish modernity not just in scale but in kind. The heroines of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Pyatero and David Bergelson’s Nokh Alemen experience crises of memory that extrapolate to a cultural and socio-political context in the layered worlds of their respective texts. These two characters are rendered inert for the bulk of their works by their inability to perceive their worlds through their pasts; for both, the rupture with the past, characteristic of Modernity, means not only loss of identity, but of possibility for action. When these crises are resolved, core divergences of thought imagine disparate possible futures for our heroines and, by proxy, for the Modern Jew in Europe.

“Anatolii Lunacharskii and the Soviet Theater” (John Dunkum)

The Soviet theater’s trajectory moved from a relatively polyphonic, even kaleidoscopic, fearless art form to a narrower, formulaic one under Stalin at the end of the1920s. I examine this evolution through the lens of the career of Anatolii Lunacharskii (1875-1933), who was the head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) from 1917 to 1929. In the twelve years that encompass Lunacharskii’s tenure at Narkompros, I use four plays as focal points to explore how their form and content, the controversies surrounding their productions, and the public’s reaction to them explain and reflect the larger political and cultural disputes of the moment. In scrutinizing Lunacharskii’s personal reflections, the bureaucratic machinations and cultural polemics within Narkompros, as well as the public and critical reaction to a few specific plays, I hope to contribute to an understanding of the causes and outcomes of the transformation of the Soviet theater. Lunacharskii struggled to strike a balance to preserve traditional theaters, and to delineate – censor – the limits of artistic experimentations explored by avant-garde directors, whose creative momentum originated from the turn of the twentieth century. On a personal level, Lunacharskii’s celebrated official moderation concealed a tragic – insofar as he did not acknowledge it – intellectual and moral muddle.

“Yesterday I was still a fool, but today I’m a bit wiser”: Reading Dostoevsky in Contemporary America (Justin Trifiro)

In June, 1870, in response to commentary on a recent public execution that took place in France, Dostoevsky wrote to the critic Nikolai Strakhov, "Man on the surface of the earth does not have the right to turn away and ignore what is taking place on earth." Implicit in Dostoevsky's moral imperative is the idea that man is beholden to acknowledge and remain attentive to the plight of others. This talk will consider the urgency of reading Dostoevsky's works in today's America, a moment marked by dubious ethical standards particularly in the context of intrahuman relations.

“Upstaging the Carnival: A Bakhtinian Take on Necrorealist Biopolitics” (Ellina Sattarova)

As the Soviet Union began to show signs of decay, Soviet cinema “celebrated” the imminent death of the state with an overflow of on-screen corpses. Particularly prolific in this regard were the necrorealists, whose short films explored the liminal state between life and death and shocked the spectator with previously-taboo images of nudity, blood and excrement. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben, Alexei Yurchak argues that the group’s provocations can be discussed in political terms. The necrorealists enacted a redistribution of the sensible by reclaiming from the state the privilege to draw the boundary between bare and political life. Yurchak’s argument, however, hinges upon a disavowal of the group’s efforts in visual arts. He chooses to focus on their early period, when the necrorealists experimented on their own bodies (by sleeping in the forest, for example, or jumping in front of moving cars). What Yurchak ignores, however, is that the necrorealists turned to cinema almost immediately after they had developed an interest in the workings of death. The cinematic medium allowed the necrorealists to produce netrupy, dead living beings that dwell in the zone of indistinction. But is an on-screen withdrawal to “bare life” devoid of political potential, as Yurchak seems to suggest? I tackle this question by examining the affinities and the tensions between necrorealism and Bakhtinian concept of the carnival. Although necrorealism has a distinct carnivalesque quality to it, it dismantles the boundary between life and death that remains intact in the carnivalesque “pregnant death.” Thus unlike carnival that deals with exact opposites and reinstates the status quo, once the temporarily authorized transgression is over, necrorealism seems to overcome the limitations of the carnival by dissolving boundaries. Paradoxically, however, this project is dependent on boundaries itself. To produce “living death,” the necrorealists required the mediating shield of a cinematic screen and the safety of the editing room, where “cutting” produced netrupy, rather than corpses.

BIOGRAPHIES

Ethan McKown : Ethan is enrolled in his final semester of the Global Environmental Policy MA program at American University, School of International Service in Washington, D.C. He graduated from the University of Montana with a double major in Political Science and Russian in 2013. Since then, he has traveled and studied in Costa Rica and Armenia, in tandem with his program in Washington. His thematic interests include environmental security, environmental economics, natural resource development policy, water resource management, and resource based conflict.

Travis Vincent: Travis is a second-year Master of Arts candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. Travis is a Flathead area native and graduated from University of Montana in 2012 with degrees in Russian and Economics. While at UM, he focused on identity and politics in literature and traveled to Vladimir and St. Petersburg for Russian language study. In 2013, Travis received a Fulbright research scholarship to study ethnic identity and politics in the Northwest Caucasus. In his Masters' program, he focuses on governance issues in natural resource management, focusing on low and middle income countries and regions - specifically Russia and Southern Africa.

Greta Starrett: Greta graduated from the University of Montana in 2013 with her Bachelor's in Russian Language and Literature and a minor in Central and Southwest Asian Studies. Following graduation, she spent a year in the Republic of Georgia on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. Her experience in Georgia led her to pursue a Master's Degree in International Studies from the University of Washington. While in graduate school, she returned to Georgia on a State Department internship where she was able to research ethnic minority integration in Georgian society for the Embassy's Human Rights Report. She graduated with her Master of Arts in June 2016. Currently, she lives in Colorado and works at a preschool, but still hopes to join the diplomatic field one day.

Alana Holland: Alana is a PhD candidate in modern Russian and East European History at the University of Kansas. She also has minor fields in Modern Europe and Nation/Empire. She completed an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. She earned her BA in History from Arkansas State University in 2012 but spent 2009-2010 at the University of Montana as a member of the National Student Exchange program. Much of her work focuses on Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies. Her dissertation project examines early postwar criminal trials in eastern Poland and the Soviet west. She uses the analytical lens of emotion to understand how non-Jews in the Polish-Soviet west responded to the fate of the Jews during and after WWII. Her project shows the early stages of construction of memory of the Holocaust in Poland, and contributes to understanding the aftermath and construction of memory in post-genocide societies.

Tyler Dolan: Tyler is a second year doctoral student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois. He is a graduate of the University of Montana, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts with majors in English Literature and Russian in 2010. His areas of research broadly include Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian Literatures, questions related to Slavic-Jewish identity and representation, trauma and memory studies, theories of nationalism, and the city of Odessa as a cultural and artistic space.

John Dunkum: John Dunkum was an enlisted Navy man from 1982-87 and in his first year he began his study of Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA. In 2011 he received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Montana, majoring in Russian, minoring in Linguistics and Philosophy. Then in 2015 he received his Masters of Arts in History from the University of Montana, where Robert Greene was his thesis advisor.

Justin Trifiro: Justin Trifiro graduated from the University of Montana in 2013 earning a BA in Russian Language and Literature. During his undergraduate years at UM, he studied twice abroad in Russia (in Moscow and St. Petersburg) and was the recipient of an ACTR essay prize, a prestigious national award in foreign language composition. Trifiro is currently a Provostial Doctoral Fellow in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California where he earned an MA in 2015. His research is oriented around 19th-century Russian culture with a focus on the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Recently, Justin has begun to professionally engage with aspects of Polish culture (20th century popular song and the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski) through intensive summer language study at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He is in the formative stages of submitting a dissertation prospectus that will examine the philosophical problem of friendship in Dostoevsky's major fictions.

Ellina Sattarova: Ellina Sattarova is a PhD candidate in Film Studies with a concentration in Slavic at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2010-11 she taught first-year Russian at UM through the Fulbright Program and then received an M.A.in German from UM in 2013. She received her M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. Her dissertation explores the biopolitical turn in recent Russian cinema; it focuses on the work of Aleksei Fedorchenko and Vasilii Sigarev and the ways in which their films conceptualize the relationship between human life and political power.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER PROFESSOR TOM SEIFRID

We are very honored to have had Professor Seifrid as our keynote speaker. He has been an inspiring and supportive colleague for many years. Dr. Seifrid completed his B.S. in Wildlife Biology at UM, with a major in Russian, in 1978. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1984, and taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from 1982-85. He is currently Professor in and chair of the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. From 2013-14 he was president of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). He primarily studies twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, particularly that of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s; Russian philosophy of language of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; the life and works of Vladimir Nabokov; and Polish language and culture. In addition to numerous articles on Russian literature and culture, he is the author of Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit (Cambridge UP, 1992), A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s ‘The Foundation Pit’ (Academic Studies Press, 2009), and The Word Made Self (Cornell UP, 2005), a study of the prolific body of writings produced in Russia from roughly 1860 to 1930 which seek to define the nature of language (or the Word, or Logos). He is currently working on a study of connections among ideology, literary genre (including theater), and urban space in early Soviet culture. He has a strong secondary interest in Polish language and culture.

TO EVERYONE WHO HAS JOINED US FOR THIS CELEBRATION:ОГРОМНОЕ СПАСИБО!

Event Organizers:

Dr. Ona Renner-Fahey, Dr. Clint Walker, and Dr. Robert Green

Event Sponsors:

The Russian Studies Program at The University of Montana

UM’s Alumni Foundation

We also owe gratitude to: our administrative staff, Karen Blazevich and Olivia White, in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures; our incredible colleague Alice Harris, for all her help; talented UM art student Leann Skach for her fantastic logo design; SRAS, for their valuable partnership, which has helped us fund this event; and UM’s Russian Club--its President Lindsey Greytak and its many volunteer-happy members!