Resilience and Russian Culture: The Censors Just Couldn’t Win
Literature • 58m
Presented by the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries
Join Professor Jeffrey Brooks, an expert in the political and cultural history of modern Russia, as he delivers the 2022 Hammerman Memorial Lecture, “Resilience and Russian Culture: The Censors Just Couldn’t Win.”
Dr. Brooks will discuss his collection of Russian books and graphic arts, recently donated to the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, that documents the wealth and vitality of high, low, and middle-brow culture during a century of extraordinary creativity from 1850-1950. Skepticism and irony emerged as key features of the culture and provided an in-born constraint to the effectiveness of state-sponsored propaganda under both tsars and Bolsheviks—a factor of note in the light of present world developments. From satirical magazines to children’s literature, these rich visual and literary materials draw on and then transcend roots in Russia’s oral and folk traditions. The subversive and playful tradition of Russian writers and satirists—a struggle for truth and freedom against repression and ignorance—is more important now than ever.
The Judge Robert I. H. Hammerman Memorial Lecture was established at Johns Hopkins University in 2006 as a tribute to Judge Hammerman’s devotion to scholarship and education for the greater Baltimore and Hopkins communities.
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