2013-2014 Maya Brin Resident: Dmitry Bykov
November 01, 2013
The Maya Brin Residency Program is pleased to welcome Dmitry Bykov
Dmitry Bykov, a journalist, poet, critic, radio personality, novelist, and one of the few figures in contemporary Russia who can be called a public intellectual, is visited the UMD campus as the first Maya Brin Resident. His strong opinions on politics, history, literature, film, education, and mass media resonate across a broad spectrum of reform-minded society and galvanize debates on a variety of topics. At the same time, his mischievously artistic personality is expressed in fizzy poetic improvisations in Moscow’s intellectual clubs. Bykov’s recent political satires in verse, Poet and Citizen, weave together civic traditions of prerevolutionary Russian intelligentsia and postmodernist cosmopolitan creativity. His book on Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago, is one of the longest bestselling biographies to have come out in Russia in the last decade. In his fiction and journalism, Bykov promotes an original version of Russian history as a “cyclical matrix” – very persistent, but not unbreakable. In several public appearances, he will shed light on the question of the Soviet legacy in Russia today.
Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the theme of the Soviet past has taken on new relevance. The authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin, the return of a resource-based economy, the resurgence of represssive politics in relation to any group or individual deemed disloyal, the failure to reform the inhumane penal system—together produce a striking sense of déjà vu and stimulate critical reflection about the Soviet legacy.
VIDEO: Dmitry Bykov Poetry Reading with UMD students 10/29
VIDEO: Symposium - The Soviet Legacy 11/1
VIDEO: Public Lecture - Stalin as the Addressee of Soviet Literature 11/1