Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 16, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Department of Slavic Languages for a joint book launch celebrating three new books by Columbia faculty: Ofer Dynes’s The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2026), Yana Skorobogatov’s Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union (University of Chicago Press, 2026), and Mark Lipovetsky’s The Soviet Trickster: Cynicism and Its Subversions (Cornell University Press, 2026). Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.
Each author will offer a brief overview of their work followed by a short Q&A period with the audience.
About the Books
The Fiction of the State locates the origins of modern Jewish literature in the political upheavals that transformed Europe at the end of the eighteenth century: the partitions of Poland, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. As Austria, Russia, and Prussia consolidated their rule over the former Polish lands, Jewish intellectuals turned to prose, poetry, and drama to engage in political debate and make sense of the new imperial order. Drawing on archival research and close readings of Hebrew and Yiddish texts, Dynes presents modern Jewish literature not simply as the product of an internal struggle between tradition and modernity, but as a field of negotiation among multiple local and imperial belongings.
Fate in My Hands offers a history of the death penalty in the Soviet Union after Stalin told through the experiences of those who endured it. Following the reinstatement of the death penalty for homicide in 1954, nearly forty thousand Soviet citizens were executed before the collapse of the USSR. Drawing on previously inaccessible criminal-court records, as well as the letters and personal objects left behind by the condemned, Skorobogatov recovers the voices of prisoners who appealed for forgiveness and of the families, friends, and officials drawn into their cases.
The Soviet Trickster examines some of the most enduring rogues, jesters, swindlers, and transgressors in Soviet and post-Soviet literature, film, visual art, and performance. Lipovetsky explores the trickster’s revolutionary messianism, dubious ethics, relationship to empire, place in underground culture, and role in Soviet gender politics. Moving across the political and cultural history of the twentieth century, the book shows how the trickster could embody the cynicism and contradictions of Soviet modernity while also opening spaces for play, creativity, freedom, and subversion.