Jane Harrison Memorial Lecture

Border Crossings, Folk Modernism: From the Literature and Art of Russian Paris to Soviet Film after Stalin

Modernism in the arts erupted into life during a period of intense political, economic, and social reform for the Russian Empire, one that culminated in the Empire’s collapse. Modernism resurfaced in the Soviet 1960s, a similar era of upheaval. Yet the cultural revolution mainly affected major cities. Peasant culture, timeless to the external eye, was a very different world. 

Professor Catriona Kelly will explore the work of writers, artists, and filmmakers whose engagement with folk culture took radical forms: the poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1891-1941) and the painter Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), both residents of Russian Paris, and the film directors Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), an Armenian from Tiflis who spent most of his working life in Kyiv, the Georgian Tengiz Abuladze (1924-1994), and Kira Muratova (1934-2018), from a Russian-Romanian background, but mainly active in Odesa.   

Professor Kelly, FBA, is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Soviet Culture at Trinity College, and an Honorary Professor at University of Cambridge. Formerly Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College.

Jane Harrison (NC 1874) was a notable and controversial academic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, respected for her writings on Ancient Greek religion, myth and ritual. She also studied anthropology and Russian. Outside academic life she was active in the suffrage movement and enlivened the fringes of Bloomsbury. When she died her friends endowed an eponymous lecture, which was to be given by a scholar, of any nationality, to stimulate research and awaken interest in a particular problem.

Free, no booking required. All welcome.

For more information contact: rebecca.kenny@newn.cam.ac.uk

• Photo shows Self-portrait: Olga Rozanova, courtesy of Ivanovo Regional Art Museum; and (right) Professor Catriona Kelly