Join us via Zoom for the first in our series of Pushkin House Book Prize 2021 talks with authors nominated for the £10,000 prize.
Evgeny Dobrenko, shortlisted for Late Stalinism, and Katherine Zubovich, shortlisted for Moscow Monumental, will be in discussion with Michał Murawski, an anthropologist of architecture and of cities, about the aesthetics of power.
Evgeny Dobrenko’s book Late Stalinism, offers a nuanced historical analysis of late Stalinism organized chronologically around the main events of the period—beginning with Victory in May 1945 and concluding with the death of Stalin in March 1953. The book analyses key cultural texts to trace the emergence of an imperial Soviet consciousness that still defines the political and cultural profile of modern Russia.
Evgeny Dobrenko is professor of Russian studies at the University of Sheffield, and co-director of the Prokhorov Centre for the Study of Central and Eastern European Intellectual and Cultural History. He previously worked at Odessa State University, Moscow State University, the Russian State University for the Humanities, Duke University, Stanford University, Amherst College, the University of California and the University of Nottingham. He was awarded the Efim Etkind Prize for the best book about Russian Culture in 2012 and the AATSEEL Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship in 2019.
In Moscow Monumental Katherine Zubovich explores how the quintessential architectural works of the late Stalin era fundamentally reshaped daily life in the Soviet capital. In the early years of the Cold War, the skyline of Moscow was forever transformed by a citywide skyscraper building project. As the steel girders of the monumental towers went up, the centuries-old metropolis was reinvented to embody the greatness of Stalinist society. Drawing on a wealth of original archival research, it examines the decisions and actions of Soviet elites—from top leaders to master architects—and describes the experiences of ordinary Muscovites who found their lives uprooted by the ambitious skyscraper project.
Katherine Zubovich is assistant professor of history at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Her interests include the history of cities and urban planning; the history of architecture and visual culture; and modern transnational history. She received her PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and previously studied at the University of Toronto and the University of Victoria.
Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and of cities based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where his is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies. His work focuses on the complex social lives of monumental buildings and on the architecture and planning of Eastern European communism. He is especially interested in the powerful - and subversive - impacts that communist-era built environments continue to exert on the capitalist cities of the 21st century.
Photo credit: "Skyscraper" by oarranzli is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
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