FACULTY COLLOQUIUM SERIES - Lev Danilkin Presents: How a Museum War Turned into a Real One
Wednesday, November 22, 2023 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1Lecture Hall
Presentation and discussion by Lev Danilkin. Danilkin has just finished writing a biographical book on Irina Antonova (1922-2020), the director of Moscow Pushkin Art Museum, and found there a curious story which helps to explain the main sociological mystery of the current war: the shockingly widespread support of the Russian population for the invasion and terror against their immediate neighbors. It is the case with “spoils of war” (WWII) which was widely discussed during 1990s: how museums triggered a new wave of nationalism and how a purely intra-museum issue of restitution of “displaced valuables” provoked a full-scale change in the political course of the Russian Federation in the late 1990s and led to the acquisition of a new identity by the population: Russians, due to uncompensated post-war trauma, “owe nothing to anyone” - and "may repeat" any time.
Lev Danilkin is a writer and literary critic, born in 1974 in Ukraine. He graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University in 1996. He is the author of four biographical books, a book of short stories and three books of literary criticism about contemporary Russian literature. The book Lenin has won the 1st prize of the Big Book Literary Award (2017). The books The Man with Egg (2007) and Lenin (2017) were shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize.
Organized by the Faculty Colloquium Organizing Team: Gale Raj-Reichert, Ewa Atanassow, Nina Tecklenburg
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