Pushkin House presents a new edition of Seven of Clubs – an interdisciplinary event series on the cross-section of arts, sciences, society and entrepreneurship.
The unique format of this info-tainment salon will allow guests to hear speakers candidly share insights into their area of passion and expertise within the intimate setting of Pushkin House.
Join the Pushkin Club for the launch of the ground-breaking new translation of Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, published recently by Harvill Secker (UK) and New York Review of Books (US).
Pushkin House presents a new edition of Seven of Clubs – an interdisciplinary event series on the cross-section of arts, sciences, society and entrepreneurship.
The unique format of this info-tainment salon will allow guests to hear speakers candidly share insights into their area of passion and expertise within the intimate setting of Pushkin House.
Svetlana Dokudovskaya and Alexandra ‘Sanya’ Ilkhovskaia, both originally from Moscow, will talk about Svetlana’s book “Operation Montparnasse”, which describes how they helped Ukrainian refugees in a Paris railway station in the Spring of 2022.
Pushkin House presents a new edition of Seven of Clubs – an interdisciplinary event series on the cross-section of arts, sciences, society and entrepreneurship.
The unique format of this info-tainment salon will allow guests to hear speakers candidly share insights into their area of passion and expertise within the intimate setting of Pushkin House.
Please join us for the launch of Professor Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s book The Afterlife of the 'Soviet Man’, which she will discuss with Professor Svetlana Stephenson, revealing the social and behavioural impact of Soviet ideology on contemporary Russian society and the need to re-evaluate our approaches to generalisations and typologies.
Pushkin House presents a new edition of Seven of Clubs – an interdisciplinary event series on the cross-section of arts, sciences, society and entrepreneurship.
The unique format of this info-tainment salon will allow guests to hear speakers candidly share insights into their area of passion and expertise within the intimate setting of Pushkin House.
At the end of 2022 Alma Classics published the final volume – Volume IV – of their ground-breaking edition of Pushkin’s Complete Lyrics and Shorter Poems. This is the first time that such a comprehensive edition of the work of Russia’s foremost poet, with original Russian texts and English translations, copious notes and background information, has been published in the English-reading world. To celebrate this landmark event the Pushkin Club has invited the experienced British Pushkinist Roger Clarke, editor of this collection, to introduce some of its highlights at Pushkin House on Tuesday 16th May.
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1821–1889) was one of Russia’s greatest nineteenth-century novelists, yet today she is virtually unknown. In celebration of her 200th jubilee, scholars and translators are working to restore her legacy and to return her to her rightful place in the canon. The event will feature readings by translators from four new translations, just some of Khvoshchinskaya’s dozen novels and two dozen tales written in her nearly fifty-year career.
A tribute to the curator and gallerist Anya Stonelake (1973-2022 ). Anya belonged to the generation that emerged during perestroyka when the Russian art scene was changing completely. Her White Space Gallery in London was the first stop for anyone interested in the post-Soviet art. She worked on performance art, site-specific projects, Russian video art and post-Soviet photography. Thanks to her tireless efforts works by Russian artists can now be found in many London museums.
Pushkin House presents a new edition of Seven of Clubs – an interdisciplinary event series on the cross-section of arts, sciences, society and entrepreneurship.
The unique format of this info-tainment salon will allow guests to hear speakers candidly share insights into their area of passion and expertise within the intimate setting of Pushkin House.
Pushkin House invites you to join two esteemed experts, Sir Laurie Bristow and Dr Julie Newton, for a discussion about the global shifts in international politics caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Almost a year has passed since Europe woke up witnessing the first major military conflict on its territory since the Yugoslav Wars, that would go on to claim hundreds of thousands of human lives among both soldiers and civilians. The existing world order seems to be in crisis and it will require years of joint efforts by international political bodies to reform the global system of checks and balances.
In a series of two lectures, historian and politician Alexey Gusev will reflect on the inclination of the Russian state throughout history towards authoritarian regimes. Is there any particular reason? How is authoritarianism constructed? Is there any hope for democracy?
Pushkin House presents a new edition of Seven of Clubs – an interdisciplinary event series on the cross-section of arts, sciences, society and entrepreneurship.
The unique format of this info-tainment salon will allow guests to hear speakers candidly share insights into their area of passion and expertise within the intimate setting of Pushkin House.
Following its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s future seems almost as uncertain as its past. Over the past thousand years it has evolved into the largest, and one of the most powerful, countries in the world. Russia is not an enigma, but its past is violent, tragic, sometimes glorious, and certainly complicated. Like the rest of us, the Russians constantly rewrite their history. They too omit episodes of national disgrace in favour of patriotic anecdotes, sometimes more rooted in myth than reality. Expert and former British Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite unpicks fact from fiction to discover what lies at the root of the Russian story, more relevant to the rest of the world now than ever.
The Pushkin Club invites you to a talk by Roland Elliott Brown, author of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, for a journey through the style and techniques of Russian propaganda, and an exploration of its use to demonise, or exploit, religion for regime benefit.
Irina Potanina is a writer from Kharkiv who has published more than 30 books across various genres. Her first solo novel was published in Moscow by AST in 2001, and her series of retro-detective novels, set in Kharkiv in the 1930s and 1940s, holds a special place in her heart. The main character is a real person, based on Irina’s great-grandfather, the famous theatre critic and journalist Vladimir Morskoy, who was arrested in 1950 and perished in Stalin’s concentration camps.
Join Index on Censorship and Pushkin House for a night discussing freedom of expression in Russia as part of the launch of the latest issue of the Index on Censorship magazine. The panel will feature Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, as well as Ben Noble, Associate Professor in Russian Politics at UCL. The conversation will be chaired by Index on Censorship magazine Editor-In-Chief Jemimah Steinfeld. In-person and online event.
Join us for an event to mark the publication of a new stand-alone edition of Azerbaijani Akram Aylisli’s Stone Dreams in English and a discussion on the writer and his work, with Aylisli’s translator and 2022 Pushkin House Translation Residency awardee Katherine E. Young, and Caucasus expert Thomas de Waal. The novella Stone Dreams caused a sensation when published in 2013. Engaging with the taboo topic of pogroms against Armenians in Azerbaijan, it was hailed as a sensitive and ground-breaking work of literature by some, but led to the vilification and persecution of Aylisli in his native Azerbaijan. In-person and online event.
This illustrated talk by Professor Simon Franklin explores the relationships between the history and the ideologies. Stripping away the polemical myths, it introduces Rus itself, before exploring what lies behind the conflicting modern claims to ownership of the remote past.
The Pushkin Club is delighted to welcome Anna Starobinets, a journalist, scriptwriter and novelist who has recently fled Russia, and Katherine E. Young, a translator and laureate of the Pushkin House translation residency. They will discuss Anna's recent book, Look At Him – a 'beautiful, darkly humorous, and deeply moving' memoir that explores the moral and psychological effects of the loss of a pregnancy and its aftermath. Starobinets and Young will also discuss the overall publishing situation for writing about women's lives and family wellbeing in Russia and describe Look at Him's journey beyond Russia in translation. Both Look At Him and the author herself are life-affirming, honest and engaging, and this promises to be an incredibly special evening. Online and in-person event.
Pushkin House invites you to an online lecture by Russian art historian Professor Alexei Leporc dedicated to the influence of Ukrainian culture on the Russian architectural tradition of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In the words of Professor Leporc, it was Ukraine that gave late 17th century Moscow its most precious necklace of magnificent churches. Following the Eternal Peace Treaty of 1686, which set out the division of Ukraine between Poland and Russia, Moscow was visibly influenced by the Ukrainian tradition and architecturally “Ukrainised” as Russia took greater political control over the country. Everything usually described as “Naryshkin Baroque” was a rather direct result of a fascination with splendid Ukrainian churches but is too often misinterpreted as being the first wave of Western European influence on Russian culture. Online event.
The invasion of Ukraine has acted as a tipping point in the West's relationship with Putin's Russia, with tragic consequences for those on the ground, and far-reaching repercussions globally. But what are the roots of this current crisis, and were we always destined to reach this stand-off? And what do ordinary Russians feel about their country and futures today?
Join Joshua Yaffa, the winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2021 for Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, and Catherine Belton, author of Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West, for a wide-ranging conversation on these issues and more. In-person and online event.
Pushkin House presents a new edition of Seven of Clubs – an interdisciplinary event series on the cross-section of arts, sciences, society and entrepreneurship.
The unique format of this info-tainment salon will allow guests to hear speakers candidly share insights into their area of passion and expertise within the intimate setting of Pushkin House.
On Wednesday 8 June, leading translators of Russian classics Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear will present their current project at Pushkin House: a new translation of Alexander Pushkin's complete plays which will be published by the Vintage Classics Series in New York in January 2023.
The reading will be followed by a discussion led by translator Sarah Vitali about Russian literature, the challenges of literary translations of Pushkin, and what the Little Tragedies can teach us today.
The event is organised as part of Pushkin Book Weeks – a series of events dedicated to Russian culture and its translation at a time when the Russian state is waging war against Ukraine.
Join Pushkin House for a discussion with Lucy Ward about her new book The Empress and the English Doctor, charting Catherine the Great’s attempts to bring new science, inoculation, to Russia with the help of Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale. A timely tale of science, a deadly virus, and the struggle between fear and innovation.
Join Pushkin Club and Sir Tony Brenton for a talk entitled “Shakespeare the Russian” and readings of Russian poetry from the 19th and 20th centuries which was inspired by Shakespeare or Shakespearian themes. Sir Tony is the former UK Ambassador to Russia (2004-2008), was an Economic and Scientific Counsellor in Moscow (1994-1998), and is the author of several publications on Russian culture.
In his talk he will explore the meaning, importance and the attractiveness of Shakespeare for Russians and Russian culture. Have the Russians created their “own” Shakespeare? What is the link between Shakespeare’s heritage, Russian history and Russian culture?
Contemporary Queer Art and Activism in Russia brings together academic and activist perspectives from Professor Dan Healey, Anastasiia Fedorova, and Olga Doletskaya on the difficult last decade of modern Russian history, and the beauty and struggle of LGBTQ+ self-expression under increasingly authoritarian rule.
In the midst of the Russian government’s homophobic rhetoric, the 2013 ‘anti-gay propaganda law’ and other homophobic measures, the last 10 years simultaneously saw a radical increase in Russian queer media, art, public testimonials and self-expression; a kind of queer Renaissance. Is there space for queer joy in Russia LGBTQ+ activism and self-expression? What is the role of Western LGBTQ+ culture and unique Russian queerness? What direction is Russian queer art and activism headed in considering recent political events and a crackdown on free speech and journalism?
With nearly 2.2 million Eastern Europeans in the UK, they remain a relatively invisible and underrepresented minority in its creative sector. Join us for a panel discussion with thought leaders from across the UK's cultural scene to discover more.
The event will put a spotlight on the findings from the 2021 In-Between Spaces report and will encourage contributions from experts across arts and culture. It is organised by Centrala Space (Birmingham) and Pushkin House and is part of our ongoing Translocalities programme of exchange between cultural institutions in the UK and Russia.
Join the award-winning former BBC correspondent David Loyn as he reflects on Russia’s dilemmas in Afghanistan in this latest instalment of the Pushkin Club.
Russia’s early support for the Taliban takeover has been replaced with unease at the developing situation. As the Afghan state collapses into an unprecedented refugee crisis and famine, is Russia courting disaster?
