Thanks to everyone who joined the initial semester of the CUNY Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Kruzhok, and we’re pleased to announce the new dates for the Spring 2023 schedule. Join us on select Fridays at 12:30 pm via Zoom.

We invite researchers working on the history, politics, societies, and cultures of Eastern and Southeastern Europe and Eurasia, whether you are in the United States or abroad, to participate in this workshop. Not only are scholars from New York-based institutions welcome, but so are scholars from anywhere in the world. This includes independent scholars.

Several years ago, there was a Balkan/Eastern European history Kruzhok in New York City, organized by CUNY Faculty and housed at Columbia’s Harriman Center. At different points, there was a good group of scholars from Columbia, CUNY, New York University, and Rutgers, as well as graduate students from those institutions. In order to rebuild interest in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and Eurasia and provide a forum for researchers to present their work for discussion, we restarted the Kruzhok.

SCHEDULE – RSVP for all sessions via Zoom

January 27 – EphemeREAL: Migrant Labor and Russian-Chechen Conflict Revealed when the Document Hits the Stage

Susanna Weygandt, Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, Sewanee: University of the South

In 2002, a subgenre of New Drama (Novaia Drama) known as docudrama emerged specifically to voice “direct utterance” from marginal contemporary social groups in Russia about social problems. Since then, this method has spread to Belarus, to the Belarus Free Theatre, and in 2015 to the Theatre of Displaced People in Ukraine. Scholarship by Mark Lipovetsky and Birgit Beumers (2009), Molly Flynn (2020), and Julie Curtis (2020) has brought attention to controversial topics raised by docudramas: the war in Ukraine, imprisonment without trial in Russia, human rights violations, globalization, and Russia’s difficult relationship to its former Soviet self. These scholars mainly focus on docudrama as a utopian project – rehearsal and repetition can offer a second life to a story that suffered from injustice in real-life. This research is indebted to these scholars for introducing docudrama to the Slavic field, and it builds on their work by explaining that the political significance lies both in docudrama’s choice of topics as well as in its cutting-edge artistic strategies. The methods of staging the plays are just as intrinsic to the movement as the content of the plays. This research explains that it is the artistic angle that is most exciting due to the paradoxical relationship between art and documented oral histories. This article focuses on productions of three plays from the repertoire of Teatr.doc (Moscow): September.doc (2003), Motovilikhinskie Workers (2009), and Uzbek (2012). Each of these productions engages audiences in a confrontation with “the Other” and thereby stages a participatory practice. Teatr.doc performances utilize formal techniques to stimulate the audience’s creative ability to form their own opinions about the themes presented to them, and these efforts determine the main conceptual impulse of participatory art that is behind the social project.

Susanna Weygandt documents and analyzes performance theories indigenous to Russia and East Europe that have not yet been documented. In her soon-to-be published book, From Metaphor to Direct Speech: Drama and Performance Theory in Contemporary Russia, she identifies the main writers and performance theories of the vibrant movement, Novaia Drama (New Drama), and situates this pioneering literature in the contemporary Russian literary canon and within the Performance Studies field. This research shaped her into a scholar of visual language, the body, affect, embodiment, and gender. She received her training in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton (PhD 2015; Graduate Certificate in History of Science 2015) and Masters in Russian from Middlebury College. At Sewanee: The University of the South she teaches in the Russian Department and in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program.

February 10 – Crossing the Bridges: From Lvov Across the Steppes to Asia to London’s Doodlebugs, One Woman’s Wartime Odyssey

Eva Hoffman Jedruch, author, will give a talk about her book via Zoom and in person in room 5203 at the Graduate Center, CUNY

At the turn of the twentieth century, Central and Eastern Europe was a configuration of nations dominated by three empires: Austrian, German and Russian, whose borders promised to be set in concrete. The Austrian Empire was a multi-ethnic entity of countries that had been absorbed over time. Among these were Polish lands annexed by Austria in the eighteenth century, which became the Austrian province of Galicia, where Zofia Neuhoff was born in 1905 into an upper-middle-class family. Victorian manners reigned supreme, young ladies were coached to gracefully alight from the carriage and ‘culture’ was a magic word, socially distinguishing people who possessed it from those who did not. That haute bourgeoisie morphed into the central-European intelligentsia.

Zofia’s childhood was upended by five years of WWI which she spent in the picturesque environs of Innsbruck. By 1918, the three imperishable empires disintegrated and several sovereign states emerged from the ruins. After the Neuhoffs returned to independent Poland, Zofia’s life continued on an even keel with a happy marriage and a law degree unusual for a woman in the 1930s. In September 1939, Poland was invaded by both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Overnight, Zofia’s existence was shattered. Alone, with an 18-month-old toddler, in the midst of mass arrests and deportations of civilian population, how could she cope with this new harsh reality for which her sheltered life had not prepared her?

Eva Cristina Hoffman Jedruch was born in the city of Lwów, Poland, months before the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war she lived in England, Argentina, and since 1969 in the USA. She is a chemical engineer by profession, graduate of the state university of Buenos Aires. She married Dr Jacek Jedruch, nuclear physicist and a Renaissance man, a parliamentary historian. Since 1986, Eva has lived close to New York and worked for the German chemical company, BASF, as an international marketing manager. Widowed, after retirement she enrolled at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, in the Arts & Letters program, earning a D.Litt. (Doctor of Letters) degree in medieval studies. Eva speaks five languages. She is a board member of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions (ICHRPI). Her two cats, Fritz and Janey, make wonderful companions.

February 24 – Biography and history of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski (1901-1964) 

Irena Grudzinska Gross, Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Science

This research concerns the life of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski (1901-1964), an Austrian-Jewish physicist, writer, businessman, communist, then anti-communist and gambler. In his twenties, Weissberg was a member of an international brotherhood of physicists at the peak of that science and of a cosmopolitan leftist milieu of European intelligentsia. He is best known for the book on his imprisonment in the USSR (The Accused, 1951), and for his testimony at the Paris trial of David Rousset vs. Lettres Françaises (1951), both instrumental in spreading knowledge about the Gulag. He also survived five years in prisons, a labor camp, Kraków ghetto and hiding in Nazi occupied Poland. On that second period, he wrote only one seven-page letter. In the last part of his life, he addressed the issues of war in his second book, written as a first person narration of Joel Brand, the man who in 1944 unsuccessfully negotiated with Adolf Eichmann for the lives of Hungarian Jews (Advocate for the Dead, 1958).

Irena Grudzinska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after student unrest of 1968. She studied in Poland, Italy and in the United States; she received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory, New York, Boston and Princeton universities. She is now a professor in the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Science and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Her books include Miłosz and the long shadow of war, Pogranicze, 2020, Golden Harvest with Jan T. Gross, Oxford University Press, 2012, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, Yale University Press, 2009, and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination, University of California Press, 1995. She edited books on literature and the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe and published numerous book chapters and articles on these subjects in the international press and periodicals. Between 1998-2003, she was responsible for the East-Central European Program at the Ford Foundation.

More dates in March, April and May to be added!

For most of the sessions, we will pre-circulate unpublished papers so that we can read them in advance and have a fruitful discussion with the authors. We hope this will help expand the horizons of our knowledge beyond our specializations and help authors develop their ideas.

If you are interested in presenting an unpublished work-in-progress at a future point, write to cunyreeeskruzhok@gmail.com. Please include a bio, a short summary of your project, and a working title of your paper.