MIKHAIL SHISHKIN
4 lectures
CLASSICS AND POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN LITERATURE
King’s Russia Institute and Academia Rossica invite you to a series of 4 public lectures by Mikhail Shishkin, one of the most acclaimed authors in the contemporary Russian literary world.
Tickets to be collected on the door. Please bring your PayPal confirmation with you.
£7 (£5 for Russky London members)
£20 for 4 lectures (£15 for Russky London members)
In English
How classic Russian texts and contemporary Russian politics come together in today’s Russian literature?
Mikhail Shishkin, one of the most acclaimed authors in the contemporary Russian literary world will take listeners through his own work, as well as the works of two nineteenth-century Russian classics – Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Goncharov and contemporary Russian politics. The goal is not to trace lines of influence, but rather to examine how both literary and political texts work together and interact in today’s Russia.
Translating into the language of language on the Swiss-Russian border
Mikhail Shishkin speaks about his books and being a Russian writer in Switzerland.
Wednesday 5 March 2014 | 7 pm
Safra Lecture Theatre, Kings College, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
“On the banks of the Limmat, it's as if there's a different center of gravity, and any word out of a Russian inkwell weighs much more than in Russian's country of origin. What in Russia suffuses, litters the atmosphere, the sediments and snouts, Grushnitsky the cadet, the war in Chechnya, and "Christ has risen from the dead," here is all concentrated in every word written in Cyrillic—crammed, rammed into every last ы.”
Maidenhair
The Light and the Dark
“The Half-Belt Coat”
Of Living Noses and Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol and his attempt to write “a new Bible”
Tuesday 11 March 2014 | 7 pm
Safra Lecture Theatre, Kings College, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
“Gogol and his reception are Russian literature’s greatest misconception. Collectively, his works constitute the Russian Book of the Dead, and yet he’s been consigned to the humourists’ shelf.”
Dead Souls
Nose
Suicide by Sofa
Ivan Goncharov and the pen´s victory over its writer
Wednesday 19 March 2014 | 7 pm
Room K4U.12, Kings College, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
“Ilya Oblomov’s genetic roots lie not in the Russia of serfs, as the first “revolutionary democratic” and the Soviet critics who followed them demanded, but in a Russian initiation myth: the Russian folk epic about the hero Ilya Muromets, who spent the first thirty-three years of his life on a stove-bench doing nothing and arose from it only when Russia’s enemies attacked, in order to defend his native land.”
Oblomov
Ordinary Story
“Why the devil was I born in Russia, with brains and talent!” A.Pushkin
"Черт догадал меня родиться в России с душою и с талантом! Весело, нечего сказать." А.С. Пушкин
Literature and politics in contemporary Russia
Tuesday 25 March 2014 | 7 pm
Room K4U.12, Kings College, Strand, London WC2R 2LS