The Soviet Union claimed to leave behind the bourgeois notions of patriarchy and the subjugation of women, declaring the genders equal in all endeavors. My interview with Olga Lipovskaya challenges these assertions and portrays her as a symbol for a more radical form of feminism that never came to fruition in contemporary Russia. Here was […]
The post Women’s Activism in Contemporary Russia Summary appeared first on Charles Center Summer Research Blog.
When I was writing my proposal for the Charles Center scholarship I addressed the art and oral history aspects of my project separately. Aside from the obvious common ground of the place and people, I didn’t consider them to overlap. And yet, during my time in Russia I kept finding similarities between the principles of […]
The post People Aren’t Boring appeared first on Charles Center Summer Research Blog.
After spending a full six weeks in Vishny Volochok at the Academic Dacha, My brother said our goodbyes, packed up, and left for Moscow. But our time in Russia still wasn’t over for almost 3 weeks. We spent the remainder of our time with a painter named Ilya Yatsenko, who has been a friend of […]
The post Kaluga appeared first on Charles Center Summer Research Blog.
In my postings up to now I’ve talked about what I spent the vast majority of my time doing in Russia – painting. But no less important to my project, though it took up much less of my time was the oral history project I conducted with artists at the Academic Dacha. That’s what I […]
The post Story Time appeared first on Charles Center Summer Research Blog.
The weekend of June 13th we took a train to St. Petersburg to see an exhibition commemorating the 150th anniversary of Isaak Levitan’s birthday. Levitan was one of the 19th century’s greatest landscape painters. He may still be Russia’s most loved landscape painter. For anyone working with the landscape, the exhibition would be a must-see. […]
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Our first two weeks in Volochok we spent painting – in the morning, midday and evening, which during summer lasts until eleven when the sun finally sets. Our focus was on short etudes in oil – from life. For the most part we painted landscapes – in fields, on river banks and in the woods […]
The post Painting in Volochok appeared first on Charles Center Summer Research Blog.
(I was without internet during my time in Russia, and so over the next few days I’ll finally be posting my blog entries – pictures pending until I get a hold of a scanner.) The night before leaving we got a call from a painter friend who had worked with the Kugach’s before. He warned […]
The post Early June appeared first on Charles Center Summer Research Blog.
My research involves taking interviews in Russian and then transcribing them and then translating them into English. The most difficult part for me is the transcribing. It is hard enough to make complete sense of what someone is saying to me in Russian when I can see their body language and facial expressions. It is […]
The post Trouble With Transcribing appeared first on Charles Center Summer Research Blog.
My research focused on the work of women activists in Russia, but this comprises only a small portion of the women in that country. Due to the highly patriarchal nature of Russian society, women are often relegated to less prominent positions both socially and professionally. Never reaching equal footing with their male counterparts. This is […]
The post Women’s Roles in Russia appeared first on Charles Center Summer Research Blog.
The first interview that I did in Russia was one of the most surreal experiences that I had over there. First off, setting up the interview was a challenge in its own right. My interview subject was staying at her summer cottage or dacha, taking care of her granddaughter, so it was quite difficult to […]
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