Lecture: The cult of journalism in the 1990s

DESCRIPTION

Writer, literary critic and journalist Vyacheslav Kuritsyn will talk about the atmosphere of unlimited freedom and faith in the power of creativity and in the postmodernist idea of erasing the boundaries between "low" and "high" culture in Russian journalism of the 1990s.

In the 1990s, the pages of newspapers and magazines were a space for radical aesthetic experiments. It was not just marginal publications, but also national newspapers and mass-circulation magazines.

Kuritsyn will discuss the newspapers Segodnya (his articles are the basis of his project for the exhibition Toward the Source) and Nezavisimaya gazeta and the magazines Matador, Stolitsa, and Afisha. He will also talk about so-called beyond-cultural journalism.

He will talk about characters such as Titus Sovietologist, Boris Kuzminsky, Denis Gorelov, Valery Panyushkin, Sergei Mostovshchikov, Konstantin Ernst, Gennady Yozefavichus, Ram Hasiev, and Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper.

ABOUT THE LECTURER

Vyacheslav Kuritsyn (b. 1965, Novosibirsk. Lives and works in Ekaterinburg and Moscow) — a writer, literary critic, journalist, poet, and curator, Kuritsyn graduated from Ural State University, Ekaterinburg in 1989 and moved to Moscow in 1993, where he graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities (1995). He has worked as a literary columnist and journalist for many key publications of the 1990s, including Segodnya, Matador, Nezavisimaya gazeta, Kommersant, and Russkii telegraf. He was the editor in cheief of Tekst (a supplement of Ural magazine) and the newspapers Moskovskaya al’ternativa and Neofitsial’naya Moskva. From 1998 to 2002, Kuritsyn ran the online project “Modern Russian Literature with Vyacheslav Kuritsyn.”
He is the president of the conference Kuritsyn Readings in Ekaterinburg (together with Ural State University), the founder and host of the Russian Poetry Slam (in Moscow and St. Petersburg since 2001), and also the founder and co-owner of the legendary club Platform (St. Petersburg, 2004–2006).
Kuritsyn is the author of fifteen books, including the monograph Russian Literary Postmodernism (2000), the novels Matador on the Moon, To Sleep and Believe: A Blockade Novel (using the pseudonym Andrei Turgenev), and the research volume Nabokov without Lolita.
In addition to his literary practice, Kuritsyn has written productions for Teatr.doc (Moscow) and Ekaterinburg Youth Theater, and curated exhibitions of Russian contemporary, including Davai (Berlin and Vienna, 2001–2002). He was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in 2005.