Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Slavisches Seminar
Sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Excellence Strategy of Eberhard Karls University
Organized by Anne Lounsbery (NYU) and Schamma Schahadat (Tübingen)
Location: Wilhelmstr. 50, room 215

Private spaces and enclosed homes where the everyday is enacted are an especially intriguing topic  in the Russian and Soviet case, since the borders between the private and the public have constantly shifted. This dynamic perception of private and public space began already in the 19th century, when private homes became the scene for collective debates on public topics (like the Bakunin home), or from the 1860s on, when experiments of communal living took place, often based on Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel Chto delat’? (What is to be done?) from 1863. Also in the 19th century religious sects experimented with communal forms of living and the religious community substituted the traditional family. 

Research on living and housing in Russia focuses mainly on two periods: first, on experiments of the avantgarde, often in the context of avantgarde architecture in Russia, second, on living in prefabricated buildings (in the Soviet Union: khrushcheby), and, third, on communal apartments (kommunalka). Our conference wants to broaden the perspective by, first, also paying attention to earlier periods, like Anne Lounsbery does in her book on literary living in the provinces or John Randolph on the Bakunin family home as a place of origin for Russian idealism. And, second, the topic of living is a genuine object of cultural studies, so that we want to bring together scholars from literary studies as well as from history.

Thursday, June 23rd

09.30-10.00 a.m.     Anne Lounsbery, Schamma Schahadat: Introduction

10.00-11.00 a.m.     Anne Lounsbery (NYU, New York): Taste at Home

11.30-12.30 a.m.     Sara Dickinson (Genova): Gender and Domesticity in Turgenev’s First Love 

12.30-01.30 p.m.     Melissa Frazier (Sarah Lawrence College): Dostoyevsky and the Material World

03.00-04.00 p.m.    Rebecca Friedman (FIY, Miami): Timeless Interiors: The Layering of Domestic and Temporal Narratives (via ZOOM)

04.00-05.00 p.m.    Bella Grigoryan (Pittsburgh): Middling Homes, Paper Goods in the 19th Century (via ZOOM)

Friday, June 24th

09:30-10:30 a.m.     Gesine Drews-Sylla (Würzburg): Inside or Outside? Configurations of Caucasian Living Spaces From Pushkin to Tolstoy

11.00-12.00 a.m.     Jennifer Flaherty (Bologna): Folklore and Modernism in the Izba: Nikolai Klyuev's Izbianyе pesni (1914-1916) 

12.00-01.00 p.m.    Edith Clowes (University of Virginia): Escaping Home or Losing Home? Modernists and Domestic Space 
            in War and Revolution: Mandel’shtam, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova

02.30-03.30 p.m.     Natalia Borisova (Tübingen): Places of Death: Domestic Spaces, Illness and Death in Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilich 
            and Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago

03:30-04.30 p.m.     Schamma Schahadat (Tübingen):  Not at Home: Nabokov's Interieurs

Saturday, June 25th

09.30-10.30 a.m.     Tatiana Klepikova (Potsdam): In Bed with Lenin: Privacy on the Pages of Oktiabr'

11.00-12.00 a.m.     Catriona Kelly (Oxford): The Material Past: The Imagination of Living Space in Soviet Historical Film after Stalin

12.00-01.00 p.m.     Susan E. Reid (Durham): Pictures in the Late Soviet Home

02.00-03.00 p.m.     Michal Mrugalski (Berlin): Eduard Kochergin's Dwellings and Vagrancies - between Settings and Set Designs

03.00-03.30 p.m.     Concluding Discussion

Information and registration: slavistik@uni-tuebingen.de