About the Lecture: In The Freest Speech in Russia: Poetry Unbound 1989-2022, the focus is almost entirely on work created before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It remains an open question what happens to Russian poets, poems, and cultural institutions now that the repressions within Russia have intensified, threatening all free speech. We are witnessing a new wave of emigration, and new fractures within the emigration, inviting us to draw on and reconsider the methods developed by earlier scholars of Russian émigré culture. We are also witnessing the persistence and courage of poets, editors, and bookstore owners within Russia itself, so methods of studying Soviet dissident culture present themselves to us for renewal as well. This lecture will survey the possibilities for freedom in poems, journals, anthologies, podcasts, radio programs, and social media posts after 2022, with examples from Israel, Latvia, Germany, the United States, and Russia. Poets and editors discussed may include Igor Bulatovsky, Dmitry Kuz’min, Lev Oborin, Irina Prokhorova, Alexander Skidan, Maria Stepanova, and Evgenia Vezhlian.
About the Speaker: Stephanie Sandler is the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Slavic Department at Harvard University. She is the author of The Freest Speech in Russia: Poetry Unbound 1989-2022 (Princeton University Press, 2024) and a co-author, with Andrew Kahn, Mark Lipovetsky, and Irina Reyfman, of A History of Russian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018; paperback 2022). In 2026, the Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry (co-edited with Catherine Ciepiela and Luba Golburt) will, she hopes, appear.