NEWSLETTER
Of
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Toronto
Vol. 1 No. 1
Fall 2006
Figured ceramic tobacco pipe bowls covered with green glazing
and found at the Baturyn fortress
(Photo by V. Mezentsev)
Contents
A. Current and Future Events sponsored by the Slavic Department
B. Significant Events from the past year sponsored by the Department.
C. Continuing Events, including sponsored series and affiliated publications
D. Faculty Profiles of Kenneth Lantz and Sarah Young
E. Faculty News
F. Postings about our graduate students and our alumni
Current and Future Events
The Year of Languages
2006-2007 has been officially recognized as the Year of Languages at the University of Toronto. This initiative of the Faculty of Arts and Science is intended to highlight and celebrate the more than forty languages that are taught on our campuses. Students will be encouraged to learn one or more of these languages and to immerse themselves in another culture, both in our classrooms and in the countries of the chosen languages. This special commemorative year, which has been planned by members of the various language departments with additional funds provided by the Dean of the Faculty will feature lectures by resident faculty members and visiting scholars; a film festival in early October under the general title, "Speaking Across the Frame: Language and Culture in European Cinema"; an international symposium on language teaching and learning; and, in the area of Slavic languages and literatures, both a special workshop in translation on February 2nd and, a day later, a day-long program for the Opera Exchange on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the opera by Shostakovich staged in the winter by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto’s new opera house. The Faculty of Arts and Science has also printed a special brochure, which will be sent to all incoming students in 2007 to increase awareness of the richness of the University of Toronto’s language resources and to encourage them to broaden their linguistic, literary, and cultural horizons.
The address of the general portal for information on the Faculty’s events is http://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/languages and a calendar of the events sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures for the academic year 2006-2007 may be found at the following site: http://www.utoronto.ca/slavic/news/index.html
Newsworthy Events Sponsored by Dept in 2006.
IN SEARCH OF (CREATIVE) DIVERSITY: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN POLISH LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES ABROAD
FEBRUARY 2-5, 2006
ST. MICHAEL’S COLLEGE
This conference was a collaboration of four institutions: the University of Toronto (Prof. Tamara Trojanowska, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures); Indiana University (Prof. Bill Johnston, the Polish Studies Center); Ohio State University (Prof. Halina Stephan, the director of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies); and the Jagiellonian University (Prof. Michal Markowski, the chair of International Polish Studies). And the work done in Toronto by Artur Placzkiewicz, Agnieszka Polakowska, and Olga Ponichtera to help organize the conference should also be acknowledged.
The conference comprised ten panels and two roundtables, involving in all about fifty presentations. Seventeen presenters came from universities across the United States, seven from Canada, one from Great Britain, one from Belgium, and sixteen from five different universities or institutions in Poland. There were also representatives of the Polish diplomatic corps in Canada and in the United States (one from each Embassy and one from the Consulate General in Toronto), and from the Fulbright Commission in Warsaw.
The conference was extremely important in a number of ways. It was the first one of its kind in North America. It allowed participants to focus exclusively on Polish Studies, in particular, the study of literature and culture; but it also gave scholars the opportunity to discuss cross-disciplinary projects and initiatives on their own terms. All in all, the conference gave a wonderful sense of the richness and the theoretical and substantive vigor of the field, and its interconnectedness with multiple disciplines. It was notable that many junior faculty were involved, as well as nine graduate students from Poland, United States, and Canada. Graduate students were also actively involved in all aspects of the organization of this international conference.
The conference served a vital function in terms of shaping future needs and directions for Polish Studies in North America. The final panel of the conference was devoted to a plenary discussion of how best to promote Polish Studies in the coming years; this discussion resulted in the development of a concrete plan of action. Four major initiatives were proposed:
1. It was decided to hold a conference once every two years, with a rotating location. In 2008 it will be held at Indiana University-Bloomington. There was unanimous agreement that the conference provides a unique and essential opportunity to build a community of scholars and critics, students and teachers, to shape the field in the future, and to consult on pressing academic and professional needs.
2. In the intervening years it was decided to organize summer workshops on Polish literature and culture for graduate students. The plan is to pool resources, to gather a larger number of students than is possible at any one institution, and to offer more specialized, in-depth courses than can be offered at individual institutions, given the fact that no single institution has more than one or at the most two faculty members specializing in Polish. The model proposed would involve an intensive program of perhaps four weeks, again housed at various institutions, in which a range of advanced courses in Polish literature and culture would be offered by faculty from several universities for North American students.
3. The urgent need for a new history of Polish literature was discussed. It was agreed that this project would take two forms. One will result in an encyclopedic handbook of Polish literature along the lines of the Handbook of Russian Literature edited by Victor Terras. The second will result in a new book on the history of Polish literature and culture. Two taskforces were established to explore such projects.
4. Equally pressing is the need for translations of Polish literature of high quality. It was proposed to establish a new series of Polish literature in translation, either affiliated with an existing publisher or by setting up a press specifically for this purpose. A small committee was formed to explore options for such a series.
In addition to these concrete plans, there was a wide-ranging discussion on the promotion of Polish Studies in North America. This resulted in numerous smaller-scale but nevertheless important initiatives in which specific conference attendees made commitments to explore ways of attracting, keeping, and supporting students of Polish literature and culture.
The participants agreed to give the organizers a mandate to raise funds for these specific projects in Poland, the United States, and Canada, and to inform the Polish government about the discussed initiatives and seek its involvement in the active promotion of Polish studies abroad.
An Evening of Poetry with the Ugly Duckling Presse
A poetry reading and discussion with poets, editors and translators from the Ugly Duckling Presse, New York City, took place at the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto on March 23, 2006. Participants, all of whom are associated with the Presse’s East European Poetry Series, included Press founder and Series editor Matvei Yankelevich; poet and associate Series editor Genya Turovskaya; Czech translator Veronika Tuckerova; Slovenian poet Ales Mustar; and Macedonian poet Lidija Dimkovska. The event was coordinated by Ann Komaromi and sponsored by the Centre for Comparative Literature, CERES and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Projects Affiliated with the Slavic Department
Toronto Slavic Quarterly
This journal, founded over four years ago by Zakhar Davydov and Ken Lantz, is the first online magazine devoted to widening the appreciation and knowledge of Slavic culture as well as to a broadening of that culture's knowledge and appreciation of foreign literature and art. Each and every issue—and so far there have been 17 issues with over 500 articles—has been of substantial size with many essays and reviews. Sections have been devoted to the scholarly work of academics and critics—and sometimes their memoirs and the far from well-known artistic prose, poetry, and drama of these same scholars. Specific cultural trends, those at the centre of important conferences in major cities throughout the world, are highlighted. Translations into English from materials in several Slavic languages are often featured, but there are also translations into the Slavic languages of the works of writers from Europe and North America. In addition, contributors provide archive materials—letters, plays, essays—published for the first time. Significant and useful bibliographies of Slavic materials published in various countries around the world are included, and readers are also given first glimpses into new books just prior to their publication. And, finally, there are memorial tributes to people in the arts who have died. It is too difficult to summarize all the services provided by this important ad useful publication, but all are welcome to discover the rich delights and value of this periodical at its website: http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/
Other organizations, publications and projects affiliated with the Department through various members of the faculty include:
Canadian Association of Slavists
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press
Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature
Encyclopedia of Ukraine
Ukrainian Literature; A Journal of Translations
Macedonian language website
Tolstoy Studies Journal
The Bulletin of the North American Chekhov Society
Rossiane v Azii
Journal of Finnish Studies
Faculty Profiles
Kenneth A. Lantz
Professor Kenneth Lantz retired this June after more than 35 years of service to the university. He has for so many years been one of our most popular teachers, a productive scholar and translator, an effective and humane administrator, and a respected and trusted colleague that, because he has long been admired, he will be long missed. And his many years of service and dedication have been appreciatively noted by the American Association of the Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages, which has just announced that he will receive its 2006 Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Profession.
His interest in Russia, its language, literature, and culture, began accidentally, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Alberta. Intending to major in French and German after he had given up his original plan to do engineering., he began to search out the school's German Department. On the way, however, he ran into what must have been a very persuasive Russian instructor—the only one on staff at that time—and was convinced to start studying the language. From Alberta to Ontario he continued his training in Slavic in graduate school. In 1970 he went to Russia as an exchange student, and his advisor was Vladimir Borisovich Kataev, perhaps the leading Chekhov scholar in Russia today. He also took a lecture class with Kataev, who as a young, enthusiastic, and liberal lecturer delighted in challenging the ideological assumptions of his indoctrinated students.
After he completed his dissertation, "Aspects of Chekhov's Comedy, 1880-1887," and received his PhD degree in 1974, Ken began teaching at the Erindale campus of the U of T (now known as UTM) and in the Summer Russian Workshop, of blessed memory. The early years of teaching were especially exciting and rewarding because he helped Professor Norman Shneidman, who became a lifelong friend, develop the Russian program at Erindale. After he moved to the St. George campus, he was appointed Associate Professor in 1979 and Professor in 1987. On both campuses he was a respected teacher offering undergraduate and graduate courses on Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was particularly successful in generating interest in and drawing students to his courses on the novels of Dostoevsky. An offering focusing on the interaction of literature and literary criticism in the 1860s. was another specialty of his, as was a class on Gulag literature, which he originally developed as a First Year Seminar in the early days of what became a very successful program..
In addition to his teaching, he shouldered a number of administrative chores within the Slavic Department, within the university, and at a number of other Canadian universities, where he was asked to evaluate other Slavic departments. In 1994 he stepped in at a critical time in the history of our department to serve as Chair. By the time he left five years later, the potentially destructive rifts in our unit had been healed, and he helped establish the collegial atmosphere that we enjoy today. And, of course, thanks to his success as Chair, he was suitably rewarded with later administrative burdens, most of which he cheerfully assumed.
His research and writing, despite his administrative chores, remained extensive and varied. In addition to a number of articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews he found time to publish both a monograph on Leskov's life and work, Nikolay Leskov, together with a volume of translations of Leskov’s tales, The Sealed Angel and Other Stories. A few years later he published an important scholarly compilation, Chekhov: A Reference Guide—a survey together with short descriptions of the major books and essays on Chekhov written up through 1883. His next project was the translation of Dostoevsky’s A Writer's Diary in two volumes. The first volume was honoured in 1993 as the Best Translation of the Year by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. His latest achievement is A Dostoevsky Encyclopedia, which came out in 2004. And he looks forward in his retirement to doing more writing on the authors to whom he has dedicated much of his life, He feels there is more to be read and more to be said.
One other important contribution was his founding, together with Zakhar Davydov, and co-editing for a number of years of the successful Toronto Slavic Quarterly, the first online journal of the arts and culture of the Slavic world.
Looking back on his career and reflecting on the many changes in the profession and in the fields of Slavic studies, Ken notes with special interest and satisfaction the increased opportunities to contact scholars and critics in Russia and other countries abroad. The internet has, of course, facilitated communication, but there are also more invitations for Canadian scholars to attend conferences in foreign countries as well as publish their scholarly work there. Also greater are the opportunities to bring scholars and critics from other countries to teach, lecture, or participate in learned conferences in Canada. The more such exchanges between foreign scholars and students and our own the better. And to facilitate exchanges with the Russia and Russians, students today should, according to Ken, commit themselves to honing their linguistic skills both in Canada and abroad, where they should be encouraged to travel and, if possible, study. What is more than strongly implied in this advice is the need for a firm grounding in the language that students must receive in their home universities, and that Slavic departments on our continent must supply,
One other piece of parting advice given to students who are planning careers in the field of Slavic languages and literatures as well as to professionals who are preparing the following generation of teachers and scholars is to avoid narrow specialization. Students of literature ought to receive and seek a broad training in their chosen fields, one that emphasizes language but also ranges widely over centuries of literary art, criticism, and culture. Not only should they acquire a feeling for the historical sweep of their special fields and some sense of significant developments in linguistics, but they should be encouraged to seek out teachers with diverse points of view and attack and to appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of differing critical approaches.
Sarah Jean Young
Sarah Jean Young, Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, began teaching for us in September 2005. During her first year she taught first-year Russian—to be more precise, she taught one section of the course and coordinated all of the various sections— and literature courses on the Russian short story and the Gulag in literature. And judging from the evaluations of her students and the high marks given to her teaching abilities, one can easily predict that her classes should attract students for years to come.
Sarah became interested in Russian and all things Russian early, at age 14, in a British public school, where she had already began the study of her second language, French, three years earlier. In addition to language instruction in Russian—she recalls that she was set, a few years into her study of the language, the rather formidable task of translating into English the first paragraph of Gogol's short story "The Nose"—she was introduced to Russian literature. After she finished public school, she attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where she graduated with honors in Modern and Medieval Languages. In 1997 she was awarded an MA, with distinction, in European Languages and Cultures from the University of Manchester. She completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham, where her dissertation was titled "Reading, Narrating, Scripting: Psycho-Poetic Strategies in Dostoevsky's Idiot." For the next two years she was a Leverhulme Special Research Fellow, a two-year grant given her in a year when she was the only scholar in the field of modern languages to be to be awarded this prestigious fellowship. Other research grants she won included awards from the BASEES Post Graduate Committee and the British Foundation for Women Graduates.
In the year 2003–4 Sarah taught at both the University of Nottingham and the University of Leeds. The next year was spent as a freelance translator, though the year also included a trip to Russia and a stint working at the Dostoevsky Museum, where she helped organize and also participated in a Dostoevsky conference. This was not her first trip to Russia; she had earlier done substantial research for her dissertation in Russian libraries and discussed her project with experts from the Institute of Russian literature in St Petersburg, the Petersburg Dostoevsky Museum, and the Dostoevsky Research Centre in Petrozavodsk.
2004 saw the publication of her book, Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Ethical Foundations of Narrative: Reading, Narrating, Scripting. She characterizes this book, which developed out of the dissertation, as follows: "My monograph … theorizes the role of character and interaction within the structuring of the narrative, leading to an extensive analysis of the models of selfhood and otherness defined in the text, and the narratological and ethical implications of power relationships within Bakhtinian dialogue." Reviews of the book have been flattering, and Sarah is especially pleased by the notice taken of her work in Russia and the interest in translating and publishing the book there.
Her continuing interest in Dostoevsky is reflected in two other projects, The first is the co-editing of a festschrift in honour of the well-known English scholar and critic, Malcolm Jones. Working with her co-editor, Lesley Milne, Sarah marked the achievements of Professor Jones, who was also Sarah's research supervisor and mentor, with a series of commissioned essays on Dostoevsky, The festschrift titled Dostoevsky: On the Threshold of Other Worlds. Essays in Honour of Malcolm Jones was published at the beginning of this year. The second project is, again in her own words, "a study of narratology and ethics in Russian labour camp writings. Although in this work I am broadening my research interests to include twentieth-century literature, the foundations of the genre in nineteenth-century writings, in particular, Dostoevsky's Notes from the Dead House, provide the starting point, and also many of the ethical, narratological and linguistic bases of study. Questions of time and identity become central, as my research demonstrates how this body of literature engages with the problem of the limitations of narrative as a means of representing 'reality,' and poses a challenge to official ideology, language, ethics and history, becoming a literature of moral opposition." Her engagement with her current project is reflected in the titles of a number of papers—"Narrating the Gulag," "The Gulag Body," The View from the Watch Tower: Space, Time, and Identity in Gulag Narratives" are just a few of the title—she has presented recently at a number of universities and conferences in Canada and Europe.
Her articles in books and journals reveal yet another facet of her scholarly work on Dostoevsky, his interest in and use of religion, which has again become a popular subject explored in contemporary criticism. But added to her original scholarly essays is a long list of translated articles and books attesting to the wider range of her interests and activities. Together with Russian essays on Dostoevsky in her portfolio of translations may be found essays on Russian cinema, especially the book-length study by Evgeny Dobrenko of filmic representations of history in the Stalinist era. More fascinating, perhaps, are the books she translated that are devoted to chess. Sara played chess when she was an undergraduate—there were 8 chess teams in her college alone. And when a college acquaintance became an editor of a series of chess books, he asked her to translate one of the books in the series. Thus began a series of translations for Batsford, one of the world's leading publishers of books on chess. A sample of the books she translated includes: Anatoly Karpov's Best Games (1996), Positional Play by M. Dvoretsky and A, Yusupov (1996), and Winning with the Slav by Y, Markov and B. Shipkov (1994).
Sarah brings to the U of T a wealth of teaching experience, much of it acquired at the University of Nottingham, where she taught Russian literature in translation and in the original language to undergraduates at all levels and from different disciplines. .Some lectures were given to larger groups of students, but most of her work was done in small seminar groups. She was therefore well prepared for her first year of teaching at U of T, and yet she was pleasantly surprised by the students in her classes. She found them "keener" than the British students she had taught, more interested in the subject and more ready to participate in class discussion. They were also more demonstratively appreciative of the skill of their instructor in making the course material come alive and more relevant to their understanding of a foreign culture as well as their own.
But there were many pleasant surprises for Sarah in her first year in Toronto. The congeniality and collegiality of her colleagues in the Slavic Department was immediately noted, and among them she was soon accepted as a valued, thoughtful, and committed partner. The university impressed her as a dynamic and inspiring place to work, to teach to write. And she found Toronto a pleasant city in which to walk, explore, and live.
N.B. The next issue of the Newsletter will feature a section on Julia Mikhailova, the most recently appointed member of the faculty.
Faculty News
This past summer Veronika Ambros received a travel grant to do research in Berlin and Prague on German and Czech theatre. The grant was awarded by the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, a program of cross disciplinary support for research and scholarship funded jointly by the German Academic Exchange Service and the University of Toronto. This past year also saw the publication of her essay “Proměny expresionistických prvků a postupů od Čapka po Havla” [“Transformations of expressionistic elements from Čapek to Havel”] in Hledání expresionistických poetik, České Budějovice, Ústav Bohemistiky, 131–140. Other essays to be published in forthcoming journal issues or collections of essays include: “Prague’s Experimental Stage: Laboratory of Theatre and Semiotics”, which will appear in Semiotica; “Milenci z kiosku V. Nezvala aneb Národní Divadlo na vlnách avantgardy“ [“V, Nezval's Lovers from the Kiosk in 1932 or the National Theatre in Prague on the Waves of the Avant-garde”] to appear in Česká literatura; and “Prague: Magnetic Fields or Staging of the Avant-Garde;” “Fuzzy Borderlines – Čapeks’ Robots, Insects, Women and Men” will be printed in History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe, edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, Also her long review of Irina Wutsdorff, Bachtin und der Prager Strukturalismus. Theorie und Geschichte der Literatur und der schönen Künste, Műnchen, Fink Wilhelm, 2006 will soon appear in a forthcoming issue of Česká literatura. Finally, her survey article, “‘Engaged’ Playwrights: Czech Drama between Enlightenment and Gentle Revolution,” has been prepared for the forthcoming Companion to Modern Drama edited by J.K. King. to be published by Greenwood.
In January she read a paper, “Re-Defining the National Theatre in Prague” at the U of T’s Drama Centre and in March, invited to speak at the University of Ottawa, she lectured on “ Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots: The Drama of Men and Women, Bertween Reason and Intuition, Expressionism and Science Fiction;” “Franz Kafka’s Trial on Page, Stage, and Screen”
She has also revised entries for Kindlers Literaturlexikon on Václav Havel, Pavel Kohout, and Ivan Klíma.
Christopher Barnes, in addition to competing as one of the finalists from U of T, in TVO’s search to find Ontario’s best lecturer, continued his work on a monograph on Alexander Scriabin and on another project, a history of Russian pianism. He also published two articles: "The Image of Chopin." in A Century's Perspective: Essays on Russian Literature on Honor of Olga Raevsky Hughes and Robert P.Hughes, Stanford Slavic Studies, 2006; and "An Interview with Alexander Pasternak" in Stanford Slavic Studies, No. 29, 2006. Two of his translations are scheduled to be published in the winter of 2006-07. They are a translation of Vadim Bytensky, A Journey from St Petersburg (300 pages) and his edition, translation and introduction to The Path to Perfection: Russian Pianists and Moscow Conservatory Professors on the Art of the Piano (175 pages), Kahn & Averill, London UK. Also worthy of mention are a translation for a Hollywood director of Edward Topol’s filmscript “Montana,” and the republication on the personal website of Oleg Menshikov, the Russsian filmstar who played the title role in last year’s Russian film version of Doctor Zhivago, of Professor Barnes’s earlier published translation of the poems of Iurii Zhivago. Another activity is his assistance in acquiring a Pasternak collection for St. Michael’s Kelly Library at the bequest of the late Dr. Lev Ladyzhensky of Boston, Massachusetts.
Taras Koznarsky was awarded tenure this past spring. His most recent publication is “Ефемери та химери: про альманах Эфемериды та українські проекти 1830-х років,“ in Відкритий архів No 1; Kyiv: Krytyka, 2004, pp. 23-124. This is a publication of a manuscript of one of the earliest Ukrainian literary almanacs, Efemeridy, Kharkiv, 1831. The almanac is provided with an introduction and commentary. The comments on pp. 94-124 were produced in collaboration with Ukrainian scholars.
Professor Koznarsky's manuscript, "Empire, Identity, and Cultural Exchange: The Shaping of Ukrainian Literary Discourse, 1800s-1840s," a extensive elaboration and expansion of his dissertation has been accepted by Harvard University Press. His book, he informs us, traces and discusses " the shaping of Ukrainian discourse through the prism of cultural dialogue and exchange of themes, projects, and cultural capital within the Russian Empire, whose writers and intellectuals were also busy defining the parameters of Russian national culture… ."
This summer he taught at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. The title of the course. "The Myth of Kyiv," points to the subject of his next project, a book on the myth and text of this major Ukrainian city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is also working on two articles: one deals with Kyiv and Ukrainian modernism and is intended for a collection of essays edited by Irena Makaryk (University of Ottawa); and the second dealing with the Ukrainian national question and the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky is intended for a festschrift for George Grabowicz (Harvard University).
During the past academic year Christina Kramer continued research on issues in language standardization, minority language rights in the Balkans, as well as several projects relating to teaching and translation. In addition to a series of book reviews, she has several works soon to be published, including "Minority Language Rights in Primary Education: A Century of Change in the Balkans," The Kenneth Naylor Memorial Lecture Monograph Series, Beech Stave Press. 2006, and a second edition of the Double CD-ROM Macedonian: A Course for Beginning and Intermediate Students (with Grace Fielder, Liljana Mitkovska, and Phillip Hammonds), University of Wisconsin Press, revised second edition, Fall 2006. She also participated actively with group of translators working on the translation into English of the Bulgarian nineteenth-century novel Bai Ganyo by Aleko Konstantinov. The translation is currently under review by a major press, and publication in 2007 seems possible.
This past year she presented the paper "Shifting Borders-Shifting Identities: Individual Responses to Macedonian Language Standardization" at the 15th Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore, Berkeley, March 2006, and participated in the roundtable: "Translating Bai Ganyo", AATSEEL, Washington, D.C. 2005. In February she conducted archival research at the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Science and presented an invited lecture, "Issues in Language Standardization, Corpus Planning and Status Planning," to the Areal Linguistics Group, Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In addition to her demanding administrative work as Chair of the Slavic Department, she served on a number of committees within the Faculty of Arts and Science, including the Faculty Planning Committee, Graduate Enrolment Planning Committee, and the Dean's Language Advisory Committee. The Language Advisory Committee has been very involved in preparations for The Year of Languages, 2006-07 within the Faculty of Arts and Science. And, outside of the university, she began a three-year term on the Executive Committee of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL), a branch of the Modern Language Association (MLA).
Leo Livak was even busier after a daughter was born to him and his wife, Ann Komaromi, on April 15, 2005. In the next month he received an Outstanding Teaching Award for 2003-2004 from the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science, The University of Toronto, and, a little later, published the volume: Le Studio franco-russe. Textes réunis et présentés par Leonid Livak. Sous la rédaction de Gervaise Tassis. Toronto: Toronto Slavic Library, 2005.
In the next academic year he published three articles: “Le Social contre l’esthétique: le Zemgor dans la vie littéraire de l’émigration.” Cahiers du monde russe, 46.4 (2005), 817-30 ;“Geroicheskie vremena emigrantskoi slovesnosti: literaturnyi avangard russkogo Parizha (1920-1926).” Diaspora: novye materialy, Vol. VII. SPb-Paris: Feniks-Atheneum, 2005, 131-242 ; and “Rannii period russkoi emigratsii. Po materialam sobraniia Sofii i Ezhena Peti” in A Century’s Perspective: Essays on Russian Literature in Honor of Olga Raevsky Hughes and Robert P. Hughes. Stanford: Stanford Slavic Studies, Vol. 32, 2006, 416-51. He also presented two conference papers: “K izucheniiu uchastiia russkoi emigratsii v intellektual’noi i kul’turnoi zhizni mezhvoennoi Frantsii.” La Réception de la littérature française par les écrivains émigrés russes à Paris, 1920-1940. L’Université de Genève, December 2005, and “L’Émigration russe et les élites culturelles françaises, 1920-1925: les débuts de la collaboration.” Russia and the Francophone World. University of Ottawa, April 2006. And he ended the academic year with the following invited lectures : “Of Garlic, Geese, and Gogol: New Approaches to ‘the jews’ of Russian Literature.” Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University, April 2006, and “France’s Russian Secret: Russian Émigrés in French Cultural Life, 1920-1940.” Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California-Berkeley; University of Southern California, April 2006.
Professor Livak also was awarded a SSHRC standard research grant for a book project “Russian Émigrés in French Intellectual and Literary Life, 1920-1940: History and Bibliography”, and is currently working on still another book devoted to the issue of the representation of Jews in Russian literature.
Donna Orwin published two scholarly articles: 1. "L. N. Tolstoi i filosofiia otkrytogo otkaza ot filosofi" in Tolstovskii ezhegodnik (2002): 412-423. [This volume, despite its date, has recently appeared!] 2. "Sterne, Plato, and Tolstoy." in Word, Music, History. A Festschrift for Caryl Emerson. 2 vols. Stanford Slavic Studies 29-30 (Stanford, 2005) 1: 327-339. She also edited and introduced: Leo Tolstoy: Stories for Young People (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2005) and Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006). She has read a number of papers at scholarly conventions in the U.S. and Russia; they include 1. “Vliianie I. S. Turgeneva i rasskaz L. N. Tolstogo "Utro pomeshchika”." Tolstoy and World Literature Conference, Iasnaia Poliana, August, 2005. 2. "The Man with a Hat in Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and Strakhov." AAASS, Salt Lake City, November 4-7, 2005. 3. "Strakhov's World as a Whole: A Missing Link between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy." Plenary talk at Slavic Forum in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone, April 9, 2006. 4. "'Romanticheskaia nauka' v Rossii i na zapade." Invited lecture at Pushkinskii dom in St. Petersburg, July 3, 2006.
She recently returned from a month in Helsinki, reading journals and other materials relating to the 1840s in the Slavonic Library. Currently she is preparing for publication a book entitled Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, which Stanford University Press will publish, and is looking for speakers for the CERES Faculty Speakers' Series she continues to organize.
Joseph Schallert served another year as Graduate Coordinator at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. He presented a paper at the 15th Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore, Berkeley, March 2006, and developed his paper into a substantial article, "The historical phonology of the Fakija dialect of southeastern Bulgaria," which has been submitted to a Slavic linguistics journal. Also he reviewed a book on Aromanian: Mara Bara, Thede Kahl, Andrej N. Sobolev, "Die südaromunische Mundart von Turia (Pindos). Juzhnoaromynskij govor sela Tur'ja (Pind)." Materialen zu Südosteuropasprachatlas. Vol. 4, Munich, 2005. The review will appear in Canadian Slavonic Papers.
Maxim Tarnawsky delivered a paper entitled "Borrowed Theory, Native Practice: Literary Criticism in Ukraine " at the VII World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies, 25 – 30 July 2005, in Berlin, Germany. In December 2005 he was the invited guest speaker at a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ulas Samchuk, a Ukrainian writer who settled in Toronto after WWII. This event was sponsored by the Toronto branch of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada. His talk, in Ukrainian, is available on the internet at "http://lab.chass.utoronto.ca/rescentre/slavic/ukr/audio/Lit-lectures/Samchuk-NTSh-08-12-2005.m3u". In May, 2006 he delivered the annual Danylo Husar Struk Memorial lecture, entitled “The Literary Fallout of Chornobyl,” also available on the internet at http://lab.chass.utoronto.ca/rescentre/slavic/ukr/audio/StrukLectures/Tarnawsky2006.mu.
Prof. Tarnawsky was re-elected president of the Canadian Association of Slavists. He also agreed to serve as Graduate Coordinator for the Slavic Department. In whatever spare time is left to him, he plans to complete the second issue of the journal he edits, Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations, which appears in print and on the internet "http://www.ukrainianliterature.org/". Volume two is expected to appear this fall.
Tamara Trojanowska has just finished a grueling three and a half year term as Graduate Coordinator and was the chair of the Department's admission committee. She has contributed to the volume Polonistyka po amerykańsku. Badania nad literaturą polską w Ameryce Północnej (1990-2005), Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2005, which Professor Trojanowska edited with Halina Filipowicz, and Andrzej Karcz,: her first contribution is the introduction to the volume, which she wrote together with the other editors and the second is an essay "Jednostkowość i inność: Różewiczowskie odgrywanie Kafki." She is also preparing two collections for publication: Polish Culture: Personal Encounters, Public Accounts, which she will edit with Artur Placzkiewicz, Agnieszka Polakowska, and Olga Ponichtera, and The People's Republic of Characters: Postwar Polish Drama (1945-1989) in Comparative Contexts, which will be co-edited by Artur Grabowski.
Her recent conference presentations include "Looking into the Past: Miłosz and Różewicz," for the August 2005 ICEES Congress in Berlin and "Where Do We Go from Here" for the International Conference: In Search of (Creative) Diversity: New Perspectives in Polish Literary and Cultural Studies Abroad, University of Toronto, Feb. 2006. (For more on this conference see the section especially devoted to it in this newsletter.) Professor Trojanowska also recently delivered a public lecture, "The Dynamics of Cultural Paradigms: Polish Literature and Culture in the Past and Now," for students of the "Poland in the Rockies" summer program in Cranmore, Alberta. It should be noted that she (as a President of the Executive Committee of the Division of Slavic and East European Literatures) organized Slavic panels for the MLA conference.
This coming November, during her sabbatical year, she will be recognized and honoured as an accomplished ambassador of Polish culture abroad by Polonicum, the Centre of Polish Language and Culture for Foreigners at the University of Warsaw.
Borje Vähämäki who teaches Finno-Ugric studies while affiliated with the Slavic Department, has informed us that the National Film Board of Canada's documentary film, Letters from Karelia, for which his wife Professor Varpu Lindström did the historical research and in which both he and his wife acted, was nominated this fall for a Gemini Award in the "Best History Documentary Film" category. Letters from Karelia will be shown in Father Madden Hall in Carr Hall free of charge on Sunday, October 29 at 11:30 A.M., just before the Annual Finnish Studies Symposium, "Finnish Canadian Documentary Filmmakers," which will be held in the afternoon from 1 to 5.
He also announced that The Journal of Finnish Studies has just published a special issue doubling as a monograph: Pauliina Raento (ed.) Finnishness in Finland and North America. To order and to see further details go to "http://www.aspasiabooks.com".
We also want to welcome our new instructor from Finland, Tiina Haapakoski M.A., who will teach FIN100Y and FIN300F this year.
Adjunct Faculty
Zakhar Davydov, as editor of Toronto Slavic Quarterly, saw numbers 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 into "print" during the past academic year and also gave a paper, "Maksimilian Voloshin - novoe prochtenie," in which he discussed his intended project of putting online all of Voloshin's works—poetry, criticism, notebooks, travel notes, translations, diaries, letters as well as his drawings and paintings in various media—at a conference in Lyons, France in the summer of 2006. The theme of the conference at Université Jean Moulin was "L'Age d'argent dans le culture russe."
Artur Placzkiewicz helped organize the Polish conference summarized in this issue and also delivered there a paper,: “Consequences of Life-Writing Philosophy: The Case of Miron Bialoszewski.”
Volodymyr Mezentsev, a Research Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta, Edmonton and Toronto, is responsible for the Baturyn project (2001— .). He is Associate Leader of the Canada-Ukraine archaeological expedition conducting excavations in Baturyn, the capital of the 17-18th-century Cossack Hetman state in central Ukraine. The Baturyn archaeological project is co-sponsored by Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, the Shevchenko Scientific Society of America, New York, and the "Baturyn Fund" (Ukraine), which was initiated by the Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko in 2005.
This past summer about 120 students and scholars from Ukraine, Russia, Canada, and Austria took part in these digs. Prof. Martin Dimnik of PIMS has overseen the funding and helps to publish the findings of the excavations in the Canadian press. And the photos of some of the objects unearthed at Baturyn, which are placed at the beginning and close of this newsletter, were taken by Dr. Mezentsev.
Following the publication of the Canadian-American Slavic Studies issue on Evgeniia Ginzburg (Vol.39, No.1) in 2005, Rimma Volynska is continuing to promote publishing on issues related to the GULAG subject by collaborating in a new annual journal, GULAG Studies. The first issue of this journal, presently in the final stages of preparation and due to be published in December 2006, will include articles on Shalamov (Sarah Young), on Razgon (Rimma Volynska), a full historiographic bibliography of documentary materials on the GULAG (Wilson Bell), and more. Contributions from faculty and graduate students are invited for the 2007 issue of GULAG Studies.
Postings about Current Students
Anna Chukur co-organized an international graduate student symposium "New Perspectives on Contemporary Ukraine: Politics, History and Culture" (March 17-19, 2005) together with our graduate students, Luba Shmygol and Oksana Tatsyak, and graduate students from CERES, UofT. In May 2005 she presented a paper titled "Memory and Trauma in Maria Matios's Solodka Darusia" at the CAS conference at York University. Her 2005 Scholarships and Fellowships are the following: The Dmytro and Natalia Haluszka Family Scholarship in Ukrainian Studies; The Dr. Roman Turko and Yaroslawa Turko Scholarship in Ukrainian Studies; The Elizabeth Ruth Karch Award in Ukrainian Studies; The Robert Franklin Clark Graduate Fellowship in Ukrainian Language and Literature; and The Taras Shevchenko Memorial Scholarship in Ukrainian.
Lonny Harrison, who will be finishing his dissertation, will spend this academic year as an Instructor of Modern Languages (Russian) and Interim Director of Russian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana.
Tim Ormond completed his course work and passed both his general comprehensive exam and special field exam. In May 2006 he participated on a panel at the CAS conference where he discussed Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of War and Peace. He prepared an annotated bibliography for the 2005 issue of Tolstoy Studies Journal and will do so again this year. And for the coming year, for the third year in a row, he has been awarded an OGS.
Agnieszka Polakowska holds a Canadian Graduate Scholarship-SSHRC.
Olga Ponichtera was a co-organizer of the U of T International Conference, In Search of (Creative) Diversity, held in early February, 2006 and also gave a paper, "Writer Emeritus Remembers: Z Auszwicu do Belsen by Marian Pankowski." at the conference. In May she presented a paper entitled "Matuga and/or/as Professor Emeritus: Marian Pankowski's Adventures Revisited" at the CAS Conference at York University. In the same month she passed her comprehensive and special field exams. In addition to working on her dissertation in the coming year, she will also be teaching Intermediate Polish.
Luba Shmygol was one of the organizers of last March’s international graduate student symposium at CERES and she also delivered a paper, "Constructing the Self, Deconstructing the Others - the case of Izdryk's Votstsek," at the CAS conference at York University.
Mirna Šolić passed her qualifying exams, was awarded a $2000 grant in the CERES Summer Travel and Research programme , and has just received a research scholarship from the Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Oksana Tatsyak passed her comprehensive exams. She also helped organize the international graduate student symposium, “New Perspectives on Contemporary Ukraine: Politics, History and Culture,” held on 17-19 March 2006, and.delivered a paper, "Strategies of Constructing Otherness in Oksana Zabuzhko’s Prose,"at the session on contemporary Ukrainian literature at the CAS Conference at York University.
Daria Tica-Valero is returning from her maternity leave.
And we extend a warm welcome to the students beginning their graduate studies in our department this year: Adam Grunzke, Brigid Henry, Roman Ivashkiv, Nadia Korchagina, Natalia Kovaliova, and Stefan Stojanovic. We will get a chance to learn more about them in future issues
Late-breaking News
Mirna Šolić and Lonny Harrison were named the 2005–06 recipients of the University of Toronto Slavic Languages and Literatures Graduate Students Professional Development Awards, given to recognize, as the name suggests, outstanding involvement in professional activities.
NEWS FROM ALUMNI
Marko Andryczyk will be in Cambridge at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute as a Eugene and Daymel Shklar Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies. In addition to conducting research, he will present a lecture as part of HURI's weekly "Seminars in Ukrainian Studies."
Mark Conliffe was awarded tenure at Willamette University this past spring and is engaged in research during this his sabbatical semester. He is currently concentrating on Korolenko’s non-fiction (his literary criticism, social commentaries, and autobiographical works), all of which will form part of a book on Korolenko. In late November and December he will spend time in Ukraine, primarily in Poltava and the Crimea, where he will visit libraries and museums that house some of Korolenko's work as well as materials related to him. In the spring semester he will be faculty director for Willamette's group of students studying at the National University of Ireland in Galway. His wife, Gill, and their two girls will be with him there from the beginning of January until the end of April.
Elisabeth Elliott is the Coordinator of Slavic languages and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Slavic Department at Northwestern University. She teaches language and linguistic courses in both the Slavic Department and the Department of Linguistics.
Rolf Hellebust’s recent book, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (a monograph published by Cornell University Press in 2003 on the symbolism of metal imagery in Soviet art and politics) has received several glowing reviews
David Lightfoot is working on a translation of Jiři Weil's Lamentation for 77297 victims, a memorial to the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia who perished in the Nazi holocaust.
Megan Swift (Ph.D 2002) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria, where she teaches classes in Russian language, literature and culture. She will be taking up a Faculty Fellowship at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society in January to work on a book project with the tentative title "Blood, Paper, Stone: The Petersburg Text in Modernist and Postmodernist Russian Literature." She and her husband had a daughter, Bella, in October 2005.
Inna Tigountsova will be working with Luc Beaudoin at the University of Denver during this academic year.
Copper ring with seal depicting Adam and Eve with Serpent and Tree of Knowledge, 17-18th centuries, and sample of a seal wax impression (on right). The 2005 excavations in Baturyn, Ukraine
(photo by V. Mezentsev).