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Join us for the Humanities Center's bi-weekly lunchtime seminar featuring the in-progress works of our U of R fellows and affiliates. Lunch will be provided, no RSVP is required. Click here for a complete list of speakers.

 

Today's speaker is John Givens on "The Anxiety of Belief in Russian Cinema"

 

John Givens

Professor of Russian

Head, Russian Program

PhD, University of Washington

 

John Givens's first book, Prodigal Son: Vasilii Shukshin in Soviet Russian Culture, examined the life and works of one of the most popular Soviet artist to emerge in the post-Stalin period. A prolific actor, director, and writer whose life and works were a study in border crossing between artistic genres, cultural strata, political camps, and demographic divisions, Shukshin altered important paradigms through which we have traditionally understood Soviet writers and Soviet literature. In addition to his monograph on Shukshin, Givens co-translated a volume of his prose, titled Stories from a Siberian Village. The anthology is the most comprehensive collection of Shukshin's stories to appear in English and reflects Givens's interest in the art of translation. From 1999 to 2016, Givens also served as editor of Russian Studies in Literature, a quarterly journal of translations from the Russian literary press.

His second book, The Image of Christ in Russian Literature, focuses on the four authors who most famously imaged Christ in their works: Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy in the nineteenth century and Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak in the twentieth. These authors all felt a need to speak about Christ in an age of unbelief but, at the same time, paradoxically affirmed him or his teachings through indirect or even negative means. The subject of the book is thus not so much Russia's Christian literature but rather its anxiety over its Christian heritage, specifically, its anxiety over the meaning and significance of Jesus Christ.

 

Givens is currently working on a study provisionally titled The Anxiety of Belief in Russian Cinema. His multi-disciplinary investigation of religion and religious belief on Russian silver screens, both during the short Soviet century and in the post-Soviet, post-secular period since 1991, will be the first monograph on this topic in Russian studies. Different "anxieties of belief" are analyzed, including: films commissioned to discredit religion in the 1920s and 1960s; films by Andrei Tarkovsky in the 1960s and 1970s that deploy film grammar in service of indirect representations of the inbreaking of the sacred or transcendent (hierophanies) into the material(ist) world; two post-Soviet devotional Bible movies (still a rare phenomenon in post-secular Russia); and Kirill Serebrennikov's 2016 depiction of religious fanaticism as a form of male hysteria projected onto queer bodies (The Student), among other case studies. This project will be the focus of Givens's spring fellowship at the Center.

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