“Every day we wake up and hope that they will be showing Swan Lake on TV.”
The ICC arrest warrant issued yesterday for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian children’s rights commissioner, for the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children may make some Russians tentatively more hopeful that Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake will appear on their screens at some point. While the UK is alerted to serious news by non-stop all-main-channels coverage complete with news alert banners and presenters in sombre dress, Russia has traditionally been alerted to significant changes by the replacement of ordinary programmes by ballet. Continue reading “Waiting for Swan Lake : the war against Ukraine and awaiting the end of Putin”→
I was interested to hear about the Making Modernismexhibition which opened at the Royal Academy in November and continues until 12 February. It is described as “the first major UK exhibition devoted to pioneering women working in Germany in the early 1900s” and highlights four women in particular. Three of these, Kӓthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gabriele Münter, were familiar names to me and indeed have been mentioned previously in our blog post on German Expressionism in Leicester. But I had not heard of Marianne Werefkin (1860-1938) and she seemed worthy of further exploration.
She was born into Russian nobility, and as a young woman her artistic talents were recognised and encouraged, with lessons from the renowned artist Ilya Repin. In the 1890s she moved to Munich with her partner Alexej von Jawlensky who was also an artist. At this time she was probably the more skilled painter of the pair but chose to allow her art to take a back seat for a time in order to support his development. She embraced a more expressionist style of painting in the early 1900s and was one of the founders of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München which was a forerunner of the important Der Blaue Reiter movement.Continue reading “Marianne Werefkin: a pioneering modernist”→
A blurry Leonid Parfenov at an event in London in 2011
Next week will see the launch of collaborative work to bring some of the UL’s Ukrainian material together into a pop-up exhibition. This week, we will focus briefly again on the effect Russia’s war on Ukraine is having on its own country, this time through the prism of the leaked list of authors that the Moscow Dom Knigi bookshop network have apparently banned their staff from putting on display (a full ban is thankfully not in place); an article in Russian about this can be found here. The ban largely relates to the authors’ appearance on the list of ‘foreign agents’ (inoagenty) this blog has mentioned before, which ultimately boils down to their stance against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The news about Russia’s war against Ukraine gives us each week new names and/or new vocabulary. This week, we’ve heard a lot in Russian about mobilizat︠s︡ii︠a︡ (mobilisation) but some of us might also have seen the rise of the term mogilizat︠s︡ii︠a︡, a grimly wry portmanteau of the words mobilisation and – mogila (the grave). The name for a call-up paper is simply povestka, a word related to “telling” (eg povestʹ means a story). Judging by news coming from Russia, povestki are arriving in huge numbers and not only to those within the parameters Putin set out that; the scale of mobilisation is far greater than the president will openly admit.
The cover of ‘Alla Pugacheva’ by Alekseĭ Beli︠a︡kov (C202.d.4981)
In terms of names, Alla Pugacheva will either have been abundantly known to you already or also a new thing this week. Pugacheva was an absolutely huge music star in Soviet times and has remained so in modern Russia (she gets her own two chapters in David MacFadyen’s Red Stars : Personality and the Soviet Popular Song, 1955-1991; you can find other Cambridge library books, not all of them, admittedly, highly academic, about her here). Earlier this week, Pugacheva wrote an open letter to the Russian authorities requesting that she be added to the list of inoagenty (from inostrannye agenty – foreign agents) to which her husband, Maksim Galkin, a consistent opponent of the “special military operation”, had just been added. Pugacheva’s dramatic stand against the war may have come over 6 months after Russia invaded Ukraine, but it was pretty seismic. Until, that is, Putin outdid her with his address about “partial” mobilisation, about the referenda that (properly stage-managed) will allow him to claim parts of Ukraine under Russian control as parts of sovereign Russia, and about the possibility of using a nuclear bomb (no ‘blef‘, he said – no bluff)…
We should end on a light note. Alla Pugacheva’s husband, Maksim Galkin, became famous as a comedian, singer, and much more around the year 2000. He won my delighted respect in 2002 when, in response to the rather self-admiring singer Nikolaĭ Baskov’s release of an album called ‘I’m 25!’, Galkin released a rather less earnest album named ‘Well, I’m 26!’ Not many images can be found of the latter, sadly, but here is Baskov’s.
In a previous post, I referred to the years-long pattern of publishing in Russia of “popular” titles undermining Ukrainian sovereignty. I was reminded of the subject in an excellent seminar held yesterday called On the Cultural Front: Ukrainian Publishers in the Time of War, which saw three Ukrainians prominent in the publishing world – Iryna Baturevych, Yulia Kozlovets, and Halyna Lystvak – interviewed by Ksenya Kiebuzinski of the University of Toronto. A recording of the seminar has been put online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTnBj0stpzc
Iryna is the co-founder of Chytomo (literally ‘Let’s read’) which now has its site in English too. Chytomo provides important, useful, and interesting news and information about Ukrainian publishing and more – including advice and suggestions about how Ukrainian material might be made available abroad in the original Ukrainian and in translation. During yesterday’s seminar, Iryna provided a link to a Chytomo piece about the kinds of Russian publications that I had referred to previously, called Fifty anti-Ukrainian propaganda books: How Russian publishers stoke hatred against Ukrainians. The article is topped and tailed with analysis, but its main body provides the quite shocking blurb of each of the 50 books in English and shows each book cover with an image from the Russian war in Ukraine as the backdrop, as the sample screenshots here show.
Having highlighted Ukrainian and Ukraine-related films in the Klassiki database last week, I should also take the chance to mention some of the books we have about Ukrainian film.
Last year, Cambridge University Libraries started providing access to the Klassiki database of films from Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The subscription was started specifically to support courses taught under the auspices of Film Studies and/or Slavonic Studies. In its own words: “Klassiki hosts a highly curated permanent collection of films that represent the best of classic filmmaking from the region. We also offer a brand new ‘Pick of the Week’ contemporary title, selected by the curatorial team. Each of our films are accompanied by programme notes, journal essays, newly commissioned subtitles and online interviews with the best filmmakers from the region.”
In terms of Ukraine, the Klassiki database currently has 6 films in its Ukraine section. It did have a 7th – the documentary film Mariupolis (2016) directed by Mantas Kvedaravičius. As readers will probably already know, that film was about the experience of Mariupolʹ under fire from Russian-backed separatists, and its director was tragically murdered there this year in March, a victim of the 2022 full-scale war. He had been in the city to make a sequel. The 2016 film is no longer on Klassiki, since ARTE.tv have been able to license it to make it fully and freely available on YouTube here. Kvedaravičius’ 2013 Cambridge PhD thesis, Knots of absence : death, dreams, and disappearances at the limits of law in the counter-terrorism zone of Chechnya, is at the Haddon Library and in the Library Storage Facility, and here is his home department’s tribute to him.
The Ukrainian films on Klassiki were made in Ukraine and chiefly by Ukrainian directors, with one in Ukrainian (and Hutsul), two silent, and three in Russian. They include two films by Kira Muratova, two by Oleksandr Dovz︠h︡enko, one by Serhiĭ Paradz︠h︡anov (Sergei Parajanov here), and one by Marlen Khut︠s︡iev (who Cambridge was fortunate enough to host in a 2014 visit). The films’ descriptions from Klassiki follow. Continue reading “Ukraine and films in the Klassiki database : the August 2022 Slavonic items of the month”→
Subscribers to this blog will have seen a reblog earlier in the week from the CUL Electronic Collections Management site announcing access to the Russian-language newspaper Novaia Gazeta.
The Russian war against Ukraine was not only the focus of the paper in its final weeks in Russia before it closed but of course also the reason for its closure, as Russian governmental pressure relating to the so-called “special military operation” made it impossible for the newspaper to perform its duties properly.
The paper appears three times in our A-Z databases list (all three here) because East View, the platform via which we have access, provides the years 1994-2021 as a single digital archive, while providing access to the first few months of 2022 as another, and the new Europe edition as a third. The Europe edition started in Riga in early May, while the last Russian edition appeared in late March, a few days before the atrocities committed in Bucha were revealed. The latest horrors, including the torture of a Ukrainian POW, are now covered in the most recent Europe issue (but note that an ’18+’ tag is applied to articles with distressing images – take the warning seriously). Continue reading “Ukraine and anti-war Russians in ‘Novaia Gazeta’”→
When the Cambridge University Libraries Decolonisation Working Group was set up in September 2020, its members agreed that the group’s terms of reference should include the following: “We recognise that while the primary colonial legacy in Cambridge libraries relates to the British Empire, Cambridge also holds material relating to other colonial powers, past and present, and this is also part of our decolonisation focus.” The wording came about because I was keen to ensure that non-British colonial legacies should not be overlooked when we hold such extensive collections from all around the world.
The Library of Congress authority name heading for Kyïv, previously listed as Kiev.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a devastating reminder of these other colonial legacies. Putin has openly compared his “military operation” against Ukraine to Peter I’s wars of expansion (or, more specifically, wars of reclamation, in Putin’s narrative). In the library context, decolonisation work to address the colonial past and its violent embracing in the present involves many areas of library activities. This post provides just a few initial suggestions, and I hope that future posts will pick up specific defined and achievable projects that come out of these. Continue reading “Decolonisation and Russia’s war against Ukraine”→
It is hard to believe that the three-month anniversary of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred this week. As the war slips down the headlines despite the ongoing intensity of fighting, air attacks, and civilian and military loss of life, it is more important than ever to talk about the war and share information about it and the country it is being waged against.
When I was recently in the UL’s Maps Room, looking at a map of Mariupol, I also spent some time looking through a 1962 Soviet atlas printed in Moscow about Ukraine and Moldova. It struck me again and again, as I studied thematic map after thematic map, how extraordinary and ridiculous it is that Ukraine – the largest country wholly situated within Europe – was so little known to the majority of the world until this year. Even the events of 2014 – the Maidan protests, followed by illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and the outbreak of war in East Ukraine led by Russia-backed separatists – didn’t manage to put this huge and fascinating country on the map of most people’s minds, which is in part why the 2022 Russian invasion is often not understood as having had – despite the shock of the actual invasion – an 8-year lead in.
Languages across Borders 