From Pushkin to Popular Culture

“Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy was an inspiring intellectual force of nature. She made an indelible mark in two fields—Slavic studies and comparative literature—and distinguished herself as a caring teacher, a visionary academic leader, and an adventurous scholar whose thirst for interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding was contagious. This volume gathers her most important writing on poetry, dance, fiction, and television and organizes it with a view to her abiding concern for the specter of empire in Russian culture and society. Her characteristic curiosity and insight jump from every page.”

— Rory Finnin, University of Cambridge

“An inspirational figure for generations of students, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy was a tirelessly inventive scholar of Russian culture with a rare talent for forging connections and opening up new angles of inquiry. This valuable collection showcases her extraordinary range of intellectual interests across the span of modern Russian cultural history, from innovative studies of classic authors (Pushkin, Nabokov) to authoritative accounts of temporality in late Soviet literature (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky), from the gender politics of ballet to pathbreaking analyses of Soviet and post-Soviet popular culture. Throughout, we are in the presence of a scholar whose penetrating interpretative gaze and acute feel for the social life of culture nurtured a commitment to understanding Russian culture within a global context and in resistance to state-centric narratives. She is much missed, and this collection is a fitting testament to her legacy in Slavic Studies and beyond.”

 — Edward Tyerman, University of California, Berkeley