[Anthropgrad] Work-in-Progress Seminar - 20 March - Katerina Clark

[Sharon Komidar]

The Research School of Humanities presents,
 Work-in-Progress Seminar Series 

1- 2.30 pm, Friday 20th March, Theatrette, Old Canberra House

COSMOPOLITAN SOVIET INTELLECTUALS NEGOTIATE CHINA AND AFGHANISTAN IN THE
1920S 

Professor Katerina Clark

Department of Comparative Literature, and Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures, Yale University

 

In this seminar Professor Clark will discuss the writings of two Soviet
authors based on their experiences in Afghanistan and China. 

 

Larisa Reissner was in Afghanistan from 1921-1923 while her husband
served as the Soviet ambassador, while Sergei Tretiakov taught Russian
literature at Peking University for eighteen months in 1924-25. Both
published articles about their experiences, while Tretiakov also
produced a play, Roar, China!, which was put on all over the world, and
a biographical novel about a Chinese revolutionary (he also proposed
some film projects to do with his associate, Eisenstein, on a return
visit to China, but they were never funded). But both were also what
might be classified as European transnationals and cosmopolitans in that
they came from Baltic states, had a bi-lingual childhood speaking both
German and Russian, and close associations with the German left and in
Tretiakov's case avant-garde (Brecht, Benjamin, John Heartfield). This
seminar will use these case studies in an attempt to sort out the
distinctions between the terms "cosmopolitan,' "transnational" and
"international," but also look at such problems as Euro-centrism and
competing cosmopolitans as, for example, Larisa Reissner in Afghanistan
came up against modernist versions of the pan-Islamic movement. 

 

Professor Clark's research is concerned with Russian culture of the
twentieth century (literature, theatre, film, art, architecture, opera,
linguistics and scientific thought) with emphasis on the 1920s, the
1930s and the recent period, and cultural interactions in Europe with
special emphasis on the avant-garde. She is currently working on Europe
without Borders? Avant-Garde Interactions, 1920-1933 and Moscow, the
Fourth Rome, a cultural history spanning the years 1930-1941. 

 

Professor Clark's Visiting Fellowship is jointly supported by RSH and
National Europe Centre.

 

Convenors: Ken Taylor and Stephen Foster
For general enquiries please contact: 
Phone: 6125 2434
Email: administration.rsh at anu.edu.au 
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
All Welcome