DavisCenter-list May 2012

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Thursday, 5/31 Job Talk with Morena Skalamera

by Davis Center

Please join us for the following event: Thursday, May 31 Job Talk "The Natural Gas Subsidization Issue and the Waning Importance of Ukraine as a Key Transit Gate to Europe" Morena Skalamera, Visiting Fellow, Davis Center; PhD Candidate in Political Science and International Relations, University of Trieste 1730 Cambridge Street, 4th Floor, Room S450 1:30-3:00 p.m. (40 minute presentation followed by Q&A) --- Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor Cambridge, MA 02138 T 617.495.4037 F 617.495.8319 http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu http://www.facebook.com/DCRES

11 years, 11 months

The Harvard Film Archive Presents History Through the Wrong End of the Telescope: The Films of Aleksei Guerman June 22 - 25

by Davis Center

May 16, 2012 PRESS RELEASE THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE PRESENTS HISTORY THROUGH THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE: THE FILMS OF ALEKSEI GUERMAN June 22 - June 25, 2012 CAMBRIDGE, MA: The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to present HISTORY THROUGH THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE: THE FILMS OF ALEKSEI GUERMAN from FRIDAY JUNE 22 through MONDAY JUNE 25, 2012 About the filmmaker: While Aleksei Guerman (b. 1938) may be little known in the US, in his native Russia he is widely considered Tarkovsky's main rival for the title of greatest Russian filmmaker since the heyday of Soviet silent cinema. The fact that he has completed only five films in 40 years has both hindered his international reputation and added to his legend.According to Guerman, he originally wanted to be a doctor but was convinced by his father, distinguished author Yuri Guerman, to pursue an education in directing for the stage, which led to an apprenticeship with famed filmmaker Grigory Kozintsev. His first screen credit came as co-director with the more experienced Grigori Aronov on The Seventh Companion (1967), about the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution. Guerman already had strong, and unconventional, ideasabout filmmaking that he was mostly forced to stifle for this assignment; he remains reluctant to claim any responsibility for the film. He was given the chance to direct his own project a few years later: Trial on the Road set during World War II. With its decidedly unheroic look at combat, it ran afoul of the censors and was not released until 1986. In the meantime, Guerman eventually managed tomake another World War II film, Twenty Days Without War, followed by the work that won him international renown, My Friend Ivan Lapshin. The emergence of this film, combined with the release of Trial on the Road, made it possible for him to secure foreign funding for what remains his latest feature, Khrustalyov, My Car!. For the past several years, he has been working on the sci-fi epic Hard to Be a God. Guerman's popularity and importance in Russia stem in part from his decision to focus on times of historical import for the Soviet Union, from the Revolution to the death of Stalin. The preparation for each film has involved extensive research, including the examination of archival photos and interviews with survivors of the period in question. But history is glimpsed only obliquely in Guerman's work. The early films feature not heroes but simply people doing what they can to survive, only occasionally having the opportunity to wonder how their actions will be judged. As Guerman's idiosyncratic style has emerged over the course of his career, narrative itself becomes more diffuse, with major events taking place just offscreen or between scenes. Finally, with Khrustalyov, My Car!, significant incidents are not so much absent as engulfed by a mise-en-scene teeming with details and characters ranging from the banal to the grotesque, like a Brueghel painting. If Guerman's strategy is to approach history not from the top down but the bottom up, his particular genius is to present it as though glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope, where the crucial happenings and important figures are lost among the myriad occurrences of everyday life. Film notes adapted from text provided by Seagull Films and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. This series is a co-presentation with Seagull Films and theFilm Society of Lincoln Center, with the assistance of Lenfilm Studios. Generous support provided by George Gund III. Special thanks: Alla Verlotsky-Seagull Films; Paul Richer-Pyramide Films. Trial on the Road (Proverka na dorogakh) Friday June 22 at 7pm Inspired by a real case documented by Guerman's father, Trial on the Road tells the story of a sergeant in the Red Armyduring World War II who has defected to the Nazis and, as the film begins, switches sides yet again. His loyalties questioned by all except for a benevolent commander, the soldier is forced to prove his patriotism via a series of increasingly perilous missions. The visual flourishes of Trial on the Road's battle scenes even attracted the notice of some in Hollywood, but Guerman himself remains proudest of such innovative touches as actors who gaze directly into the camera. Fordaring to question the orthodoxy that World War II was a heroic struggle free of ironies and ambiguities, the film was shelved for fifteen years. Directed by Aleksei Guerman. With Rolan Bykov, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Vladmir Zamansky USSR 1971, 35mm, b/w, 96 min. Russian and German with English subtitles http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2012aprjun/guerman.html#trial My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Moy drug Ivan Lapshin) Friday June 22 at 9pm A nostalgic look back at Stalin's Russia just before the Great Purge began in 1937, My Friend Ivan Lapshin remains Guerman's best-known work internationally. Affectionately detailing a love triangle that develops in a small town between a police detective, his widowed friend and a local actress, the story is told from the point of view of a narrator (seen occasionally in the only color sequences in Guerman's work) remembering what he witnessed as a boy. The wealth of peripheral incidents - a theatrical troupe visits the town, Lapshin investigates a band of black marketers - allows Guerman to indulge his taste for weaving together a number of narrative strands that threaten to crowd each other out of the frame. From time to time, the villagers express their pride in the revolution and theiroptimism - unaware of the grim future lurking just offscreen. Directed by Aleksei Guerman. With Andrei Boltnev, Nina Ruslanova, Andrei Mironov USSR 1984, 35mm, b/w & color, 100 min. Russian with English subtitles http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2012aprjun/guerman.html#my Khrustalyov, My Car! (Khrustalyov, mashinu!) Saturday June 23 at 7pm "Khrustalyov, my car!" is supposedly the excited cry for his chauffeur uttered by the infamous Soviet security chief Beria as he hurried from Stalin's deathbed. Guerman's film is a feverish, frantic evocation of Moscow in January 1953 as Stalin lay dying. Consistent with Guerman's habit of observing history indirectly, Khrustalyov, My Car! follows the itinerary of a surgeon whose life, and that of his family, is thrown into turmoil by the infamous "Doctor's Plot," in which a group of predominately Jewish Moscow doctors were fingered as members of a conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders. Guerman creates a consistently amazing visual and aural rendition of the charged atmosphere of those sad times, in which no point of view is ever fixed, no shadow devoid of possible danger, nor any stray remark free from potentially lethal consequences. Directed by Aleksei Guerman. With Yurly Tsurilo, Nina Ruslanova, Mikhail Dementyev France/Russia 1998, 35mm, b/w, 137 min. Russian with English subtitles http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2012aprjun/guerman.html#khrustalyov The Seventh Companion (Sedmoy sputnik) Sunday June 24 at 4:30pm Having co-directed The Seventh Companion with Grigory Aronov, Guerman now discounts his own involvement, citing Aronov's more conventional approach to filmmaking. Nevertheless, the film displays the oblique approach to Soviet history that characterizes Guerman's work. Based on the novella by Boris Lavrenev, the film unfolds during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. A general in the tsar's army, having been arrested by the secret police, is released into the brave new world of the Soviet Union. His apartment is now a crowded commune and, with nowhere else to turn ("The fact that you are alive is a misunderstanding," he is told), the soldier begins a campaign to return to the battlefield. Directed by Aleksei Guerman and Grigory Aronov. With Andrei Popov, Aleksandr Anisimov, Georgi Shtil USSR 1967, 35mm, b/w, 89 min. Russian with English subtitles http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2012aprjun/guerman.html#seventh The Fall of Otrar (Gibel Otrara) Sunday June 24 at 7pm Guerman produced and co-wrote - with wife and regular collaborator Svetlana Karmalita - Ardak Amirkulov's staggering historical epic about the intrigue and conflict that led to Genghis Khan's systematic destruction of the lost East Asian civilization of Otrar. Spurring an extraordinary wave of great Kazakh films in the 1990s, The Fall of Otrar is at once hallucinatory, visually resplendent and ferociously energetic, packed with eye-catching detail and traversing an endless variety of parched, epic landscapes and ornate palaces. A national epic that is also an art film, the closest antecedent to The Fall of Otrar may be Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, yet it also betrays the influence of Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone. Directed by Ardak Amirkulov. WithDokhdurbek Kydyraliyev, Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov, Bolot Bejshenaliyev USSR/Kazak 1991, 35mm, color, 176min. Kazakh, Mongolian and Mandarin with English subtitles http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2012aprjun/guerman.html#fall Twenty Days Without War (Dvadstat dney bez voyny) Monday June 25 at 7pm Guerman's second film about World War II continues his typically oblique glance at the great events of official history by keeping the war offscreen, as the titleimplies. Twenty Days Without War takes place during a break from the front during which a soldier journeys to another town. The time is the winter of 1942 and the film's title refers to the duration of a furlough taken by Soviet Army Major Lopatin (Yuri Nikulin, a celebrated comic actor and circus performer cast against type) to deliver the effects of a fallen comrade to the dead man's wife in his own hometown of Tashkent. While there, Lopatin reunites briefly with his own ex-wife and begins a tentative courtship of a lonely seamstress working in the costume department on a feature film--a film based on Lopatin's published wartime memoirs. Above all a film of astonishing intimacy and tenderness, Twenty Days is Guerman's melancholic tribute to those who remain on the homefront in times of war, and how none of them escape without their own physical and emotional scars. Directed by Aleksei Guerman. WithYuri Nikulin, Lyudmila Gurchenko, Ekaterina Vasileva USSR 1976, 35mm, b/w, 101 min. Russian with English subtitles http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2012aprjun/guerman.html#twenty This press release and photos are available for download on the press page of the Harvard Film Archive's website: http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/general_info.html#press. The user name and password are hfapress. Please contact bgravely(a)fas.harvard.edu<mailto:bgravely@fas.harvard.edu> for screeners, additional photos, or more information. Harvard Film Archive 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (617) 495-4700 http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa General Admission Tickets $9, $7 Non-Harvard Students, Seniors, Harvard Faculty and Staff. Harvard students free Special event tickets (for in-person appearances) are $12. Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show time. The HFA does not do advance ticket sales. Press Contact: Brittany Gravely Publicist Harvard Film Archive 24 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 617-496-3211 bgravely(a)fas.harvard.edu<mailto:bgravely@fas.harvard.edu> --- Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor Cambridge, MA 02138 T 617.495.4037 F 617.495.8319 http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu http://www.facebook.com/DCRES

11 years, 11 months

HURI Book Presentation - 5/9/12 time correction

by Davis Center

The Ukrainian Research Institute invites members of the Harvard community and the general public to the following special event (Please note time change): BOOK PRESENTATIONS: The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Vodka: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2012) Patricia Herlihy Professor Emerita of History, Brown University Associate, Ukrainian Research Institute Wednesday, May 9, 2012 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Omeljan Pritsak Memorial Library Ukrainian Research Institute 34 Kirkland Street Cambridge, MA No reserved parking available, but it is just a short walk from the Harvard Square Red Line T-stop. Program is subject to change. To check for changes to the HURI Seminar schedule, please visit our website: http://www.huri.harvard.edu/calendar.html Please note: HURI now utilizes Harvard's list server. To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit our list at: http://lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/huri-events-list For further information on HURI events, please contact us at: Tel.: 617-495-4053 Fax: 617-495-8097 E-mail: huri(a)fas.harvard.edu<mailto:huri@fas.harvard.edu> --- Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor Cambridge, MA 02138 T 617.495.4037 F 617.495.8319 http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu http://www.facebook.com/DCRES

11 years, 11 months

5/9/2012 Book Presentations: The Alcoholic Empire and Vodka: A Global History, by Patricia Herlihy

by Davis Center

The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute presents BOOK PRESENTATIONS: The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Vodka: A Global History (Reaktion Books, 2012) Patricia Herlihy Professor Emerita of History, Brown University Associate, Ukrainian Research Institute Wednesday, May 9, 2012 12:15p.m. to 2:00 p.m. ** Omeljan Pritsak Memorial Library ** Ukrainian Research Institute 34 Kirkland Street Cambridge, MA No reserved parking available, but it is just a short walk from the Harvard Square Red Line T-stop. --- Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor Cambridge, MA 02138 T 617.495.4037 F 617.495.8319 http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu http://www.facebook.com/DCRES

11 years, 11 months

5/19/2012, Rachmaninoff: A Mystical Journey into the Russian Soul

by Davis Center

Rachmaninoff: A Mystical Journey into the Russian Soul Saturday, May 19, 2012, 8 pm Church of the Covenant<http://www.coroallegro.org/tickets/church_of_the_covenant/> 67 Newbury St., Boston Tickets: $18/$28/$38 *$5 off for students and seniors* Coro Allegro<http://www.coroallegro.org/> returns to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff for a performance of The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. One of Rachmaninoff's major compositions, St. John Chrysostom is a setting of a worship service of the Eastern Orthodox Church, featuring rich, chant-like, unaccompanied singing. Coro Allegro's 2005 performance of Rachmaninoff's other great liturgical work, All-Night Vespers, was one of our most popular concerts, and attendees and others have repeatedly asked to hear similar compositions. Rarely heard in Boston, this major Rachmaninoff composition, performed in the magnificent Church of the Covenant, is certain to be a deeply spiritual experience for audience members across all faith traditions and communities. Click here<http://www.coroallegro.org/season/may_concert/> for more information. --- Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor Cambridge, MA 02138 T 617.495.4037 F 617.495.8319 http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu http://www.facebook.com/DCRES

11 years, 11 months

Seminar Calendar, May 1-15, 2012

by Davis Center

Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Seminar Calendar May 1-15, 2012 For upcoming events not yet published in this calendar, please visit our website<http://thyme.hmdc.harvard.edu/davis/index.php>. Tuesday, May 1 Roundtable "Bulgaria's Evolution since 1989: International and Domestic Dimensions" Venelin Ganev, Professor of Political Science, University of Miami Irina Nedeva, Hubert Humphrey Fellow (Fulbright Scholar), University of Maryland Stefan Tafrov, Bulgarian Ambassador to the United Nations Nikolay Valkov, Postdoctoral Fellow, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Chair: Mark Kramer, Program Director, Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Room S354 12:15-2:00 p.m. Tuesday, May 1 Seminar "NO BOUNDARIES: An Exploration of Borderless Creativity in the 21st Century through the Music, Poetry and Art of Lera Auerbach" Lera Auerbach, Pianist, Composer and Poet Harvard Department of Music, Paine Hall, Room 9 (Behind the Science Center, located at 1 Oxford Street, in Harvard's North Yard) 4:00-6:00 p.m. Thursday, May 3 Comparative Politics Seminar "State Authority and International Economic Cooperation: Russia's Natural Gas Relations with Turkmenistan" Boris Barkanov, Postdoctoral Fellow, Davis Center 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Room S354 4:15-6:00 p.m. Friday, May 4 Gender, Socialism and Postsocialism Working Group Co-Sponsored by the Gender, Politics and Society Working Group, Center for European Studies "Nashi devushki: Gender and Youth Activism in Putin's and Medvedev's Russia" Valerie Sperling, Professor of Political Science, Clark University; Associate, Davis Center 1730 Cambridge Street, 1st Floor, Room S153 2:00-3:30 p.m. Friday, May 11 Early Slavists' Seminar A Bride for the Tsar: Bride-Shows and Marriage Politics in Early Modern Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012) Russell E. Martin, Professor of History, Westminster College; Co-director, Muscovite Biographical Database, Moscow 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Room S354 12:15-2:00 p.m. To purchase a parking permit for the Broadway Garage (located on Felton Street, between Cambridge Street and Broadway), please visit Harvard University Parking Services<https://www2.uos.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/permit/purchase.pl>. To register a new visitor login, choose "Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies" and enter department code 2020. All parking-related questions should be directed to the Parking Services Office at 617-495-3772. --- Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor Cambridge, MA 02138 T 617.495.4037 F 617.495.8319 http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu http://www.facebook.com/DCRES

11 years, 12 months

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DavisCenter-list May 2012