Welcome to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Welcome to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
News and Announcements
Major Russian animation company Союзмультфильм has used all-time favorite Soviet cartoon characters to create instructional videos about the coronavirus.
Prof. Zdenko Mandušić will be joining the Slavic Department in Fall 2020!
Prof. Mandušić researches and teaches Russian and South Slavic cinemas, film theory, East European art and culture after communism, and the articulation of nationalism in literature and films. In particular, his writing focuses on issues of cinematic authenticity, reality effects, the imaginary conceptualization of technology, and the influence of discourse on the production and reception of art. He is currently working on a book project, titled Restoring Truth: The Documentary Turn in Soviet Cinema After Stalin, which focuses on the mobilization of documentary elements in Soviet fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s. This project correlates the visual strategies of feature-length films with the discourse on the divide between documentary and fiction aesthetics during the post-Stalinist revitalization of Soviet cinema. In his next book, Mandušić will examine the representation of history in contemporary Russian and post-Yugoslav cinema and literature, addressing the function of novels and films as de facto sites of historical (re-)narrativization.
Summer 2020
Summer courses announcement pending.
Please check back soon!
Alex Averbuch's interview on his upcoming poetry book in Ukrainian was published on Rid project.
Guest from Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Professor Elena Krejčová had a talk on the topic
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND LANGUAGE OF THE MEDIA – BEFORE 1989 AND NOWADAYS
on
Wednesday, February 12th, 2020
And on February 13th she had a talk with Czech Language and Graduate Students about interpreting and traslating.
Click the image below to see more photos!
Congratulations to Prof. Tamara Trojanowska, whose recent publication, Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918., has won the 2019 AATSEEL Prize for best edited volume.
Alex Averbuch's interview for Linor Goralik's upcoming volume of interviews with contemporary poets was published on Colta.ru.
A collection of poems by our graduate student, Alex Averbuch, from his recent book "The testimony of the fourth person" was published in French translation in the Swiss literary journal "La Revue de Belles-Lettres."
The Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI) has awarded our Finnish program a generous grant for the next two years. This is a sign of the respect the Finnish government has for the work Prof. Anu Muhonen is doing here at Toronto, and we congratulate her on winning this grant.
A new book by Prof. Leonid Livak, on the life and work of a Russian-French translator and poet Ludmila Savitzky, has been published in Moscow. For more details click here.
Students in Elementary Ukrainian and Prof. Mariana Burak have produced a new video.
Prof. Leonid Livak has won this year’s prestigious Modern Language Association (MLA)’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, awarded biennially, for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Studying 'Ukrainian language and literature enriched my life': A&S alumnus Mark Strychar-Bodnar
Click here to read the article about an alumnus of the Slavic Department and how his Ukrainian studies enriched his life.
Czech and Slovak Culture Event and Czech Award Ceremony
On November 27th, our Department hosted the event in which students from Czech Language Course and Czech and Slovak Culture Course were presenting to our guests from Czech Community their class projects which included the interviews with some of the Czech community members. The Award Ceremony was a part of it - Nicolle Mitacek got the Ernest Tauber Award and Alex Bercik got the Tibor P. Gregor and Arthur J. Langley Sr. Award.
Click the image below to see more photos!
Polish Program Events: Fall 2019
Click the image below to view a full PDF of the Polish program's Fall 2019 events.
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, postponed from last year, has been awarded to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, while the 2019 award was given to Austrian author Peter Handke.
Tokarczuk won “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." The Judges’ statement also reads that Tokarczuk is “a writer preoccupied with local life but at the same time inspired by maps and speculative thought, looking at life on Earth from above. Her work is full of wit and cunning.” The committee also singled out for special commendation Tokarczuk’s 1,000-page historical novel, The Books of Jacob, about the 18th-century Jewish sectarian leader, Jacob Frank (Riverhead Books plans to publish the novel in English in 2021). Tokarczuk’s novel “Flights” (translated by Jennifer Croft) won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for translated fiction.
We hosted Olga Tokarczuk in the department on November 23, 2010. To read more about her, click here, or read a chapter on her writing in the recently published Being Poland. A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 (UofT Press, 2018).
Alex Averbuch's new article "The Theurgy of Impurity: Fin-de-Race and Feminine Sin in Russian and Ukrainian Modernisms" has just been published in the latest issue of the Russian Review.
Prof. Holland's project, "Digital Dostoevsky," which will create an open-access database of Dostoevsky’s works and then use methods of digital text analysis and mapping on those works. The project also includes a book co-authored by Prof. Holland and her co-applicant, Prof. Katherine Bowers (UBC) that shows how different techniques of digital reading can open up old questions about Dostoevsky’s novels in new ways. The grant runs from 2019-2025. Slavic Librarian Ksenya Kiebuzinski is a collaborator on the project.
In his project, "The Final Chapter of Russia Abroad," Prof. Livak, in collaboration with Prof. Siggy Frank of the University of Nottingham (UK), will research and write the cultural history of the disintegration of the anti-Soviet Russian emigre community in France during and after the Second World War.
