How has the iconic image of standing in line shaped Russian identity? Literary scholar Jillian Porter examines how the queue has wound its way through narratives of revolution and continues to find expression in Russian political, social, and cultural life today.
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Referenced in this episode
- Vladimir Sorokin’s 1983 novel The Queue
- Anna Akhmatova’s anti-Stalinist poem “Requiem,” written between 1935 and 1961
- Dziga Vertov’s “film truth” newsreel series Kino Pravda, which ran throughout the 1920s, and 1934 documentary “Three Songs of Lenin”
- The works of early 20th Century Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky
- Nina Tumarkin’s book Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia
- Elena Osokina’s book Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927–1941
- The Line by Russian-American novelist Olga Grushin
- The works of prerevolutionary Russian painter Valentin Serov, 1865–1911
Interim Executive Director, Davis Center
Cris Martin is the interim executive director of the Davis Center for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Assistant Professor, Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado Boulder
Jillian spent the 2015-2016 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center, where she worked on her book, The Art of the Queue.
