Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture

press release: Please join us for the next in our Spring Lecture Series: Jenny Kaminer's lecture, titled "Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture." In Russian culture, the archetypal mother is noble and self-sacrificing. "In Women with a Thirst for Destruction," however,  Kaminer shows how this image is destabilized during periods of dramatic rupture in Russian society, examining in detail the aftermath of three key moments in the country's history: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. She explores works both familiar and relatively unexamined: Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlev Family, Fyodor Gladkov's Cement, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's The Time: Night, as well as a late Soviet film (Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's Adam's Rib, 1990) and media coverage of the Chechen conflict. Kaminer's lecture speaks broadly to the mutability of seemingly established cultural norms in the face of political and social upheaval.

The Speaker:

Jenny Kaminer is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of California-Davis. She received her B.A in Russian and Theater from UW-Madison in 1996 and her PhD. from Northwestern in 2006. After visiting positions at Oberlin College and the University of Sheffield (UK), she joined the Department of German and Russian at UCD in 2009. She is the author of Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern UP, 2014), which received the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Studies from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies in 2014. In addition to gender and Russian culture, her research interests include Russian theater and drama and post-Soviet culture. Her forthcoming publications include “Vasilii Sigarev’s Post-Soviet Dramas of the Provincial Grotesque,” which will appear in The Russian Review in July 2016.