Three years ago, REEI established “The Americanists,” a lecture series aimed at exploring the rich heritage of scholarship by specialists in American Studies based in Russia.
In March of 2019, Ivan Kurilla (European University, St. Petersburg) delivered the inaugural lecture under the title “Frenemies: US-Russian Relations from a Historical Perspective.” Retracing several chapters in the history of Russian-American relations across three centuries, Kurilla showed how both the US and Russia have repeatedly used each other as a “constitutive Other” against which to measure and define themselves (video recording available here). In October of the same year, Igor Kuznetsov (Kuban State University) presented in Russian “The Red Decade in the History of Collaboration between Russian and American Anthropologists” (watch here), a talk that explored the Soviet experiences of American anthropologist Archie Phinney (a member of the Nez Perce tribe) and the American experience of Soviet ethnographer Iuliia Averkieva, participants in an little-known scholarly exchange that took place in the 1930s. Both lectures, in different ways, highlighted the ongoing significance of Native Americans in the history of Soviet-American exchange.
The outbreak of the COVID epidemic put the series on hold for three semesters but it resumed in September of this year when Professor Olga Panova, who teaches in the Department of Foreign Literature at Moscow State University, delivered an online presentation entitled “The Reception of African American Literature in the Soviet Union and Russia” (video recording). Panova offered an absorbing evaluation of developments in the record of “mutual attraction between the Soviet Union and Afro-America,” including the quest in Soviet literary criticism for a Black champion of class consciousness, short-lived romances between Soviet cultural authorities and such Marxist Black authors as Claude McKay and Richard Wright, poet Langston Hughes’ involvement in events to mark the centenary of Pushkin’s death, and the strange relegation of Ralph Ellison—a passionate devotee of Russian literature—and his Invisible Man to relative oblivion in Russia’s literary consciousness. In October, in a lecture titled “ ‘Corn Diplomacy” in US-Russia Relations” (watch here), Victoria Zhuravleva, Professor of History and International Relations and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the Moscow-based Russian State University for the Humanities, shared her research on the genuine person-to-person diplomacy and dialogue that, in her view, superseded “value-based approaches” to foreign relations, both in the popular humanitarian campaign to feed Russian peasants with American corn during the Russian famine of 1891-92 and in Khrushchev’s collaboration with Roswell Garst, an Iowa businessman-farmer, to introduce corn hybrid production technologies into Soviet agriculture.
Despite the playfulness of its title, “The Americanists” reflects a serious interest in examining the ideological undercurrents and competing impulses of opposition and attraction that have shaped—and surely continue to shape—Russian-American mutual perceptions and cultural exchange.
Bethany Romashov (PhD, Slavics, 2015; MA, Slavics, 2008) is currently pursuing an MS Ed. in Counseling Education and Counselor Education.
Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies