Director’s Greeting: Halina Goldberg, Director
Dear members of the REEI community,
You last heard from me in the Spring 2020 issue, when I was completing my one-year term as the interim director. I am delighted to address you again in my new role as REEI’s director.
Professor Sarah Phillips, the outgoing director, joyfully returned to teaching full-time in the Department of Anthropology. Sarah served REEI with dedication, diligence, wisdom, and grace. During her two terms as the director, she led the institute through two very successful Title VI grant applications, initiated several research projects that greatly benefited our faculty and students, and undertook important educational and outreach initiatives. I deeply appreciate Sarah’s enthusiastic support and the positivity she brings into every situation. I am sure there will be many times when I will turn to Sarah for her experience and wisdom. Sarah will go on, with Svitlana Melnyk and Russell Valentino, administering the IU Ukraine Nonresidential Scholars Program. The program has a new 2023-24 cohort of 34 Ukrainian scholars in addition to the 35 Ukrainian scholars from previous year’s cohort who are continuing this year.
REEI is thriving—just look at our line-up at the 2023 ASEEES conference and at the news from our faculty, students, and alumni! A new class of REEI MA students is settling into their first year at IU. We also welcomed several visiting scholars from Georgia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. Last summer, students and faculty from the University of Novi Sad in Serbia participated in a transnational dialogue about the role of history and memory in relation to racial or ethnic conflict in the US and the Balkans , a program co-sponsored by a grant from Ann and David Erne. Keep an eye out for more information about our collaboration with the Un/Filmed project in Yerevan, Armenia, which was co-sponsored by the Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel Fund from REEI. During this fall, we offered Bloomingtonians many opportunities to engage with films from our regions. In addition to the powerful 20 Days in Mariupol, soul-searching R.M.N., and poetic Color of Pomegranates, REEI supported two successful and important film festivals, featuring film screenings and accompanying events: Želimir Žilnik: Essential Work and When the Past Becomes the Present: Four Female Filmmakers Voices on the Roles of Women in the Post-Soviet World. We featured numerous guest speakers who offered scholarly insights on topics such as Tatar diaspora, the impact of George Soros on Hungary, UNESCO’s safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage, politics and gender in industrial agriculture, Robert Oppenheimer in relation to the past and present of the Nuclear Age, Russia’s kinetic and non-kinetic warfare in Georgia, as well as our Russian-language talks, renamed Прямая речь!/Straight Talk! The much awaited visit of Nadya Tolokonnikova of the dissident punk group Pussy Riot closed the 2023 Themester: Light and Truth (echoing the IU motto “Lux et Veritas”). This was the last event of the Themester program, which is concluding its 15-year run.
We also experienced sadness among us as we mourned the passing of Professor Emeritus of History Arthur Benoit (Ben) Eklof. Plans are underway to celebrate Ben’s amazingly rich life early next year, so expect an email from REEI with more details. We are currently preparing an exciting line-up of events for Spring 2024. We will share more information on these in early January.
In the meantime, I hope you have a happy and restful holiday season, and I send you my best wishes for the New Year!
Professor Elizabeth Geballe on Tolsty, Translation, and Teaching
Ani Abrahamyan (AA): Lizi, it is such a pleasure to interview you for the REEIfication. Let’s jump right in. how did you become interested in Russian literature and comparative literature?
Elizabeth Geballe: (EG) Middlebury College where I was an undergraduate, and they had an academic forum where you could go around and talk to different faculty members. And only one table had people who were laughing. I went over and asked what department they represented. “Oh, it’s the Russian department,” came the reply. “It seems that you are the only ones with a sense of humor,” I remarked, to which they replied, “We don’t have a sense of humor—we have vodka hidden under the table.” I signed up for Russian language because I thought that was so funny. From that foundation I became really interested in the literature and history, and studied abroad. I had not heard about comparative literature until graduate school and it just seemed like the obvious place for someone who did not know what they wanted to do.
AA: That funny story leads perfectly to my next set of questions. As someone that has been in Slavic studies for some time, do you see any changes over time? Does the Slavic filed still have a sense of humor? REEI was delighted to welcome four new MA students in August 2023. From left to right: Emma Carlson, Ru Khazi, Nika Khomeriki, and Kirby Fleitz.
EG: Yes, we do! We witnessed the Funny Dostoevsky conference [at Dartmouth College, a.a.] that happened a few years ago. Maybe people are more interested in humor and that’s a good thing. As for other changes in the field: I was at such a small school where there was a Russian department but there were no other Slavic languages taught. At a big state university, the field just seemed much larger and made me more optimistic. There is more interest now in indigenous literatures, decolonizing the field—I don’t remember much talk about that when I was an undergraduate. Now it’s the official topic of ASEEES 2023.
AA: What research projects are you working on right now?
EG: I am writing a book about Tolstoy, tentatively titled “Were I the Author of this Tale”: Tolstoy as Translator. People have talked about him as almost everything else: as preacher, novelist, landowner, prophet, peace activist, but no one has written a monograph about him as a translator. Everyone seems to know that he translated the Gospels, but in fact he translated a lot of fiction, starting with Laurence Sterne, going through to Maupassant, Hugo, Aesop’s fables, and Paul Carus, in addition to tons of non-fiction, too. He even translated some philosophy from Chinese, but always using German, English, or French as an intermediary, because I don’t think he trusted his knowledge of Chinese. My book looks at texts that he translated, and also depictions of translators and translations in his fiction.
AA: Was Tolstoy a good translator?
EG: Well, we don’t use labels like “good” or “bad” anymore, but I will say that copyright law was a lot different back then and I am finding many instances in which he conveniently forgot to list the original author. Tolstoy’s translations were then assumed to be written by him and translated into other languages under
Slavic Department Roundup
By: Dorotea Sotirovska
This semester, the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures (hereafter Slavic Department) is again joined by Visiting Assistant Professor Nicoletta Rousseva. An art historian specializing in the contemporary art of Southeastern Europe, Rousseva teaches courses on Eastern European art history and South Slavic literature, film, and culture. She recently curated the film series Želimir Žilnik: Essential Work, which brought the acclaimed Serbian filmmaker to IU’s campus in October for a celebration and screenings of his socially engaged work. Žilnik’s six-decade long career has focused on the topic of marginality and spanned both narrative and documentary cinema. As part of the series, his debut feature film Early Works and a program of his rarely shown short documentaries was screened at IU Cinema, in addition to talks and discussions held during his Žilnik’s visit, which kicked off an extended tour of universities and film centers throughout the US. This semester also featured the debut of the Slavic Department’s Graduate Student Colloquiums this semester, a forum in which graduate students present their ongoing research and projects on topics in Slavic literature, culture, and linguistics. In September, the series’ inaugural graduate student presenter Ani Abrahamyan presented a tentative chapter of her in-process dissertation “Ethnographies of Siberian Prison Life: Reevaluating Colonization and/ as Punishment.” In April, the Slavic Department announced the Michael Henry Heim Chair in Central and East European Letters, an endowed professorship created through a gift by Priscilla Heim in honor of her husband, literary scholar, translator, and Professor Michael Henry Heim. Heim introduced numerous literary classics to the English-reading world through his translations and helped develop the field of translation studies. Professor of Comparative Literature Bill Johnston, himself an accomplished translator and teacher of literary translation, is the inaugural recipient of the Heim Chair. Johnston will work with the Slavic Department to organize academic events as part of his duties as Heim Chair. In August, Senior Lecturer Sofiya Asher launched the Global Russian Language Project, an open-source tool for Russian language training that provides an audio repository of regional variation in spoken Russian. It also includes audio recordings of Russian language samples from Russian-as-a second/foreign-language speakers of various native languages, such as Kazakh, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz.
