Dear Readers,
It is my pleasure to present you with the seventeenth volume of the UC Undergraduate Journal of Slavic and East/Central European Studies. This year’s papers come to us from a diverse collection of schools, including from our home university, UCLA, as well as its rival across the beltway, USC. While football feuds may drive them apart, our authors’s interests in the literature, music, and history of East Europe and Central Asia bring them together in the pages of our journal. Our lodestar remains to provide a platform for undergraduate students to present their research achievements using the languages of East/Central Europe and Eurasia, and as always, our authors’ accomplishments do not fail to impress. It remains our steadfast belief that the future of our field lies with researchers like the ones represented in the pages of our journal, and we are very happy to share their accomplishments with you.
Although literature and history have traditionally been the primary topics of interest among the submissions we receive, several articles in this year’s journal tackle performance studies. Susannah Lahiri (UCLA) and Jack Szczuka (Indiana University) examine the political utility of Soviet ballet and musical composition, respectively. “Ballet and State Power in the Soviet Union, 1930s–1960s” takes a long view of the role that artistic institutions have played in the expression of Soviet ideology by way of interpreting several classic Russian ballets. “Soviet Musical Orientalism: The Role of the Symphonic Works of Reinhold Glière” looks at the same phenomenon through the lens of a single composer’s artistic biography, and in doing so shows how the USSR grew its political influence through the concert hall.
Literature, of course, is never far from our journal’s ambit. Daniel Schrader-Dobris (USC) also provides something of an artistic biography in “The Paroxysms of Paradox: Dying of Contradiction,” which looks at the evolution of how Fyodor Dostoevsky treats the notion of despair between The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. In “Chekhov’s Sorceresses: An Evolution of Magic and Gender in Chekhov’s Works,” Nicole Gonik (Hunter College) takes a non-traditional approach to a traditional subject for Slavic Studies by looking at Chekhov’s frequently-analyzed female characters through their connection to the supernatural—an atypical but, it must be said, deeply suggestive approach. Anna Matveeva (Bard College) does practically the opposite: her article “The Body by Genrikh Sapgir: The Soviet Context” addresses the work of Soviet dissident poet Genrikh Sapgir, whose work has been criminally under-read, from a thoroughly philological stance.
Our two final papers offer historical analyses that challenge the mainstream. In “The Post-Independence Multivector Foreign Policy: How Kazakhstan Carved its Autonomy from Russia Long Before the Russo-Ukrainian War,” Kurtis Yan (UCLA) demonstrates that, despite what Russian- and Western-oriented sources might think, the Russian ideological and political hold on Kazakhstan is far more tenuous than we tend to believe. In a similar vein, Victoria Korotchenko (UCSB) decenters typical sources for histories of the Russian Revolution in favor of the experiences of child diarists, artists, and activists in “The Fate of the Motherland’s Children: Youth Action, Trauma, and Experiences within the Russian Revolution (1917–1923).”
The publication of this journal remains a team effort, and we have many people to thank. Once again, we congratulate our contributors, and welcome future submissions from undergraduate scholars interested in East Europe and Eurasia. We express our gratitude to Yelena Furman, undergraduate mentor and so much more at the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures. Thanks are also in order for Ryan Fogle, webmaster at the UCLA International Institute, and all members of the editorial board, whose help is an invaluable part of the review process. As always, we remember Olga Kagan, who founded this journal sixteen years ago out of a dedication to supporting young and novel scholarship.
Finally, we deeply appreciate the Center for European and Eurasian Studies and the UCLA Office of the Dean of Humanities, whose support makes this journal possible.
Cooper Lynn
Managing Editor