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Speakers): Katerina Clark, Yale University

In 1921 Fedor Raskolnikov, Larisa Reisner and Lev Nikulin journeyed over the mountains from Central Asia to Kabul where Raskolnikov was to serve as the Soviet plenipotentiary, Reisner was his wife, and Nikulin was to work in the embassy’s press office (and later the consulate in Herat). The lecture will address the problematic issue of ”Soviet imperialism” (?) by placing these writers and their memoirs about Afghanistan in terms of Bolshevik confrontations with the British in an area stretching from Iran to Delhi, the allure of the East for the revolutionary ecstatic, these writers’ infatuation with Persian poetry, and their ambivalent treatment of the traces of the great civilizations and empires that had distinguished Afghanistan in centuries long past.

 

KATERINA CLARK is Professor of Comparative Literature, and of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her publications on Russian culture include The Soviet Novel: History As Ritual (Chicago), Mikhail Bakhtin (with Michael Holquist, Harvard), Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Harvard), and Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Harvard). She is currently completing work on Russia’s cultural contacts with the ‘Orient’.