From Pushkin to Popular Culture
Essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy’s broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular culture. Her work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialist impulses and rhetoric in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement. In addition to some of Nepomnyashchy’s best previously published scholarly work, this volume includes excerpts from The Politics of Tradition: Rerooting Russian Literature After Stalin, the book manuscript that Nepomnyashchy was working on in the last years of her life.
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy was Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian and Chair of the Slavic Department at Barnard College and Director of the Harriman Institute (2001-2009). Her scholarly interests included Pushkin, nineteenth-century journals, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Russian ballet, and literary and political developments in post-Soviet Russia.
Emily D. Johnson is Brian and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma. She works on twentieth and twenty-first century Russian culture. Most recently, she co-edited the volume Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (Indiana University Press, 2022) with Alan Barenberg.
Irina Reyfman is Professor of Russian Literature at Columbia University. The focus of her work is interaction of literature and culture. She is the author and editor of several books, including How Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Tables of Rank (The University of Wisconsin Press: 2016; paperback 2021).
Carol R. Ueland is Professor Emerita at Drew University. Her scholarly works are on Russian poetry and translation, women’s studies and biograpy. Her most recent book is Literary Biographies in the Lives of Remarkable People Series, co-edited with Ludmilla A. Trigos (Lexington Books, 2022).
