2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 409 Tier Building
Central and East European Studies Lecture Series:
Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of the Child, a public talk by Paul Morris (Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface).
Children and images of childhood play a prominent role in the writing of Vladimir Nabokov, a multilingual Russian-American writer most famous in North America as the author of Lolita (1955). While the motif of children in Nabokov’s oeuvre is multi-faceted, the fate of these fictional children usually is not. Frequently, they suffer and die. Nabokov criticism has wrestled with the troubling implications of these repeated depictions of pain and suffering. A common reading has been to suggest that the image of the child serves as metaphoric representation of the fragility and transience of life and, likewise, as an extreme expression of evil. In my presentation, I intend to offer an analysis which partakes of this interpretation and expands it considerably. With a reading based primarily on Nabokov’s poetry, I suggest that the child in Nabokov’s writing is more than an image of primarily thematic importance. The child, I propose, functions as an essential element in Nabokov’s poetics and represents a defining feature of his distinctive authorial voice.
Paul Morris teaches translation at the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface. He has published on a variety of topics related to Canadian, American and Slavic literatures. His Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice appeared in March 2010 with the University of Toronto Press.
Friday, March 4, 2011
3:00 p.m.
Archives & Special Collections, 330 Elizabeth Dafoe Library
Rudnyckyj Lecture: Faces of Stalingrad: the Last Veterans' Portraits and Voices
Jochen Hellbeck, historian, writer, and Professor of History (Rutgers University), 2011's J.B. Rudnyckyj Annual Lecturer at the University of Manitoba.
A historian of Russia by background, Dr. Hellbeck’s interests lie in the study of autobiographical accounts and people’s self-understandings in historical perspective. One of his recent books, Revolution on My Mind (2006), explores personal diaries written in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Dr. Hellbeck’s talk will be a presentation of a partly historical, partly artistic project in which he has been deeply involved over the past year. Together with Emma Dodge Hanson, a photographer from Saratoga Springs, NY, they traveled to Russia and Germany in November 2009, to visit about twenty of the last surviving veterans of the battle of Stalingrad in their homes. Over the course of several weeks of interviews and picture-taking they were able to generate a large number of personal portraits and testimony. This unqiue project demonstrated the workings of two different memory cultures: the haunting shadows of loss and defeat on the German side, and the culture of national pride and sacrifice in Russia.
Sponsored by: The University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections; the Slavic Collection, Elizabeth Dafoe Library - University of Manitoba; and The Department of German & Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba.
2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
2:00-3:30 p.m.
Winnipeg Art Gallery
Documentary film: A Kingdom Reborn: Treasures from Ukrainian Galicia
Director Dani Stodilka discussed the film and answered questions post-screening.
Co-sponsors: Winnipeg Art Gallery; Canadian Ukrainian Congress; Department of German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
1:30-3:00 p.m.
409 Tier, Institute for the Humanities
Justin Jaron Lewis (Department of Religion, U Manitoba)
Imagining Holiness: Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times
Moderator: Elena Baraban (Department of German and Slavic Studies, U Manitoba)
Monday, 8 March 2010
7:00-9:00 p.m.
Ukrainian Labour Temple, 591 Pritchard Ave.
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (Department of History, Northwestern University)
Between Nationalism and Communism: The Adventures of Ivan Kulyk in Ukraine and Canada.
Ivan Kulyk (1897-1937) was a major Ukrainian poet. He was a founder of the Hart group in Kharkiv and Montreal, the head of a Red Cossack Cavalry Unite, the USSR ambassador in Canada, and the admirer of Louis David Riel. A socialist to boot, Kulyk dreamed of a Ukraine no more colonized by the imperial powers. This dream turned him into a major supporter of Ukrainian national-communism. The talk explores how a Jewish boy from the shtetl of Uman became a leading Ukrainian writer and a cultural entrepreneur in Canada and Ukraine, grappling till his death with nationalism and communism.
Moderator: Myroslav Shkandrij (Department of German and Slavic Studies, U Manitoba)
The talk is co-organized and co-sponsored by the Canadian Society for Ukrainian Labour Research and the Department of German and Slavic Studies, U Manitoba.
Thursday, 18 March 2010
2:30-4:00 p.m.
St. Andrew’s College, The Great Hall
Marcia Ostashewski (Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Cape Breton Studies; Cape Breton University; Visiting Professor of Music at McMaster University)
Ukrainians in Unexpected Canadian Places: Informing Studies of History and Cultural Performance
Marcia Ostashewski explores the legacy of Aboriginal and Ukrainian settler encounters on the prairies - in music, dance and related expressive culture. Her work raises questions about perceptions of intercultural relationships and their place within Ukrainian and Aboriginal cultures in modern Canada, and engenders new perspectives about Ukrainians and group identity with regard to constructions of identity, nationhood and community.
Moderator: Myroslav Shkandrij (Department of German and Slavic Studies, U Manitoba)
The talk is co-organized and co-sponsored by the Center for Ukrainian-Canadian Studies and the Department of German and Slavic Studies, U Manitoba.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
2:30-4:00 p.m.
409 Tier, Institute for the Humanities
Roman Yereniuk (Centre for Ukrainian-Canadian Studies, U Manitoba)
Ukrainian Educators in Lviv and Their Knowledge about the Diaspora: Results of a Survey
Moderator: Elena Baraban (Department of German and Slavic Studies, U Manitoba)The paper presents the results of a survey questionnaire in the oblast of Lviv of four cohorts of educators and their knowledge and comprehension of the Ukrainian diaspora.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
409 Tier Building
Body and Sense in Polish Baroque Literature
A talk by Dr. Miroslawa Hanusiewicz-Lavallee,The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. The paper concerns predominant aspects of the imagery used in Polish Baroque religious literature as appealing to senses, affections, and even bodily passions. The author shows significant opposition between somehow ascetic, mostly biblical and modest in expression Protestant literature of the time, and poetry written by Catholic authors as influenced by St. Ignatius’ doctrine of applicatio sensuum, tendencies of Spanish mysticism but also main currents of Italian and French Baroque. These stylistic differences imply and reveal in fact certain important anthropological alterations, significant for both denominations. Sensuous, theatrical and affectionate qualities of religious literary works of Polish Baroque seem also very important for understanding the sources of contemporary religious sensibilities in today’s Poland
Presented by Central and East European Studies Program.
2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
6:30 p.m.
Dafoe Library at the University of Manitoba
Oksana Zabuzhko, leading writer, critic and public intellectual, will be this year’s J.B. Rudnyckyj Annual Lecturer.
Co-sponsors: Archives and Special Collection, Dafoe Library; Slavic Collection, Dafoe Library; Department of German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba
On the same day at 1:00 p.m., she read from her work and answered questions. This reading was conducted primarily in Ukrainian, and took place in Oseredok (Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre).
Thursday, October 22, 2009
7:00 p.m.
Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre, 184 Alexander Avenue
Book launch: Myroslav Shkandrij’s Jews in Ukrainian Literature (Yale University Press)