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Papers by Matthew Kendall

Slavic Review, 2024

rechushedshej-epohi-sobranie-viktora-duvakina.html (accessed January 9, 2024). Duvakin was motiva... more rechushedshej-epohi-sobranie-viktora-duvakina.html (accessed January 9, 2024). Duvakin was motivated to preserve hundreds of Soviet voices in response to a sudden change in his professional life: in the spring of 1966, he was fired from Moscow State University's philology faculty after publicly coming to the defense of his former student, the writer Andrei Siniavskii, at a widely reported show trial. Duvakin joined forces with university students like Radzishevskii and his future wife, Marina Radzishevskaia, who helped the professor record, catalog, and transcribe some three hundred interviews. Radzishevskii's personal account of his time spent with Duvakin can be found in his article, Vladimir Radzishevskii, "Izgoi s dopotopnym magnitofonom: Zhizn΄ posle katastrofy," Znamia, no. 12 (2004), at https://znamlit.ru/publication.php?id=2531 (accessed January 9, 2024). 2. The Institute's website can be accessed at http://www.oralhistory.ru; it features nearly 100 interviews conducted by Duvakin and several other notable sound recordings. Many of the site's recordings have now been transcribed and translated into multiple language, and Shklovskii's interviews with Duvakin and Radzishevskii (https:// oralhistory.ru/talks/orh-814) were recently translated into English and annotated by the scholarly team of Slav Gratchev and Irina Evdokimova as Dialogues with Shklovsky: The

Nestandart: Zabytie eksperimenty v sovetskoi kul'ture, 1934-1964, 2021

The Russian Review, 2022

We hear it often: modernity teaches its inhabitants new techniques for vision. 1 These modern sub... more We hear it often: modernity teaches its inhabitants new techniques for vision. 1 These modern subjects, as we know, use their visual training to navigate the new optics linked with technologies, spaces, and aesthetic objects of their epoch. Yet by now, scholars working in the field of sound studies claim that accounts of the eye overlook the ear, a myopia that James Lastra has named the great "unthought" of modernity. 2 In the past two decades, I want to thank

Book Reviews by Matthew Kendall

Russian Review, 2023

In Recording Russia, Gabriella Safran tells a story about tools that made written records of oral... more In Recording Russia, Gabriella Safran tells a story about tools that made written records of oral speech, and about the listeners who used them. These technologies ranged from stenography to mass-produced paper, but Safran's subjects are not an obscure group of enthusiasts. Recording Russia positions literary stars like Dostoevsky and Turgenev alongside academics like Vladimir Dal' and Pavel Rybnikov, and it argues that these men constituted a "media generation," meaning that their attempts to capture, catalogue, and often invent the voice of an ethnically and nationally distinct Russian people was always in dialogue with new methods for recording speech. Across eight chapters headed by short, thematic titles ("Ringing," "Singing," and "Laughing," for example), Safran explores a habit that these men shared: each delighted in grabbing new or unfamiliar words from the everyday babble of a milieu other than their own, and then tried to find the perfect space for these words in literary or academic writing. Each listener, however, had remarkably different methods and aims. For example, Dal' produced a reference manual of the Russian language for a public that had long lacked one, but he often contorted the words of peasants into shapes more reminiscent of Moscow speech patterns. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, used excessively marked speech to boast about his expertise in depicting Russian class differences, but was criticized for doing so. Recording Russia thus asks a bigger question about what it means to listen to someone fundamentally different from you, and it points toward a pessimistic reality. Indeed, Safran suggests that the inherent malleability and instability of listening modes emblematizes this group's failure to adequately depict the real lives of people other than themselves. Accordingly, Safran's meticulously researched and impressively detailed chapters about each subject's thoughts on sound, listening, and speech become foundational for a larger claim about the more consequential development of national and ethnic identity in the Russian Empire. Safran's topic is regretfully timely: the war in Ukraine has brought many harsh realities into focus, but one is the unfortunate reminder that language politics remain contentious in Eastern Europe. Relatedly, one of Recording Russia's most important contributions is found in its introduction of thinkers from the field of linguistic anthropology like Asif Agha and Michael Silverstein to readers of Russian literary studies (who are still the primary audience for this book). This is a group that offers ideas which might become, as Safran shows, crucially helpful for our attempts to identify, critique, and ultimately de-center Russian notions of superiority from the Slavic field. Recording Russia will, however, propose an uncommon task to readers who keep up with studies of nineteenth-century literature. Safran wants us to entertain a truly material understanding of literature, made evident by the book's suggestion early on that literary composition is sometimes similar to the act of "recording sound on paper" (p. 3). Some readers might feel uncomfortable with this strippeddown approach, but Safran always shows that it is the key to unlocking the book's larger claims.

Review: Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, 2020

Marx used the image of combustion to suggest that social change was inevitable, but he never aske... more Marx used the image of combustion to suggest that social change was inevitable, but he never asked if melting solids led to a sustainable path. Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos proposes that we scrutinize cultural modes of production-cinematic production, to be precise-for the Arctic region, where an excess of combustion has rendered melt far from metaphorical. Across 19 chapters and an introduction, the contributors and editors of Arctic Cinemas offer an ambitious new account of how documentary cinema and the Arctic have shaped each other. What results is a compelling, often archipelagic assemblage of essays that challenges norms in both cinema and area studies. The main contribution of Arctic Cinemas is a provocative idea: that "the Arctic is central to documentary film theory and history, yet until now, it has not been understood as such" (2). The volume's introduction convincingly shows that the Arctic has often served as the documentarian's muse, and as one could expect, many of its chapters make reference to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), the cinematic urtext of documentary misrepresentation. The opening intertitle of Flaherty's film exoticizes "mysterious Barren Lands" and a "desolate, boulderstrewn, wind-swept" landscape, but Artic Cinemas' contributors point out that the documentary's visual language has had a more lasting impact on the Arctic's cultural perception. Judy Wolfe's essay on Indigenous filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, for example, recalls how images of "crying" seals ("tears" protect the seal pups' eyes from the cold) aimed to shock the viewers of anti-fur documentaries in the 1970s and '80s, which mobilized boycotts that economically devastated the Inuit (275). Dominic Gagnon's recent, troubling film Of the North (2015) played for audiences an arrangement of Inuit "found footage" culled from social media, but Faye Ginsburg shows that the film reinforced its viewers' pervasive stereotypes. Clearly, the power of documentary film-and its potential for abuse-is still remarkably potent. Arctic Cinemas offers a corrective through the ultimate word in its title, ethos. Apropos of work on documentary ethics by Bill Nichols, the editors argue that ethical decisions inform every aspect of documentary filmmaking, which produces "artistic and ideological works, made to persuade audiences, engage in rhetoric, and, in particular, mobilize ethos." (12). This is not to say that all documentary is ethical-ethos articulates only what is at stake for the subjects, spectators, and makers of a documentary film. Every major era and mode of documentary, the editors write, has relied on the Arctic as a cinematic blank slate, allowing filmmakers to sculpt its visual carte blanche into fodder for their own ethical position. The cases most illustrative of this phenomenon include the cinema of Dziga Vertov, who used montage as a viable alternative for Flaherty's fractured gaze (in some cases, using Flaherty's own images); similarly, the latter third of Arctic Cinemas examines the work of contemporary Indigenous filmmakers, who have used documentary to respond to their routine misrepresentation. Although the "transnational, interdisciplinary" (2) approach of Arctic Cinemas suggests that area studies may suffer from a limited scope, the volume's vision is assembled mostly by area experts. Three essays are of particular interest for those who work inside the borders of the Eastern European and Eurasian field, and happily, they are among the volume's strongest entries. Lilya Kaganovsky's reading of Dziga Vertov's One Sixth of the World (1926) transfers Arctic Cinemas' concerns onto the Soviet cinema in a chapter that must be read alongside the volume's introduction for full effect. Kaganovsky suggests that Vertov's Arctic montage distinguished Soviet cinema as an inclusive space that created an ethnic Other both distant from and allied with its viewer, a technique which rendered cinema (in Vertov's eyes) as the only "tool by which these benefits were made tangible" (51). Jeremy Hicks demonstrates that Arctic visions from Cold War British and Soviet documentaries more fully illuminate the cultural myths of expansion and resource dominance that characterized this period. Oksana Sarkisova's history of doc

Slavic Review, 2024

rechushedshej-epohi-sobranie-viktora-duvakina.html (accessed January 9, 2024). Duvakin was motiva... more rechushedshej-epohi-sobranie-viktora-duvakina.html (accessed January 9, 2024). Duvakin was motivated to preserve hundreds of Soviet voices in response to a sudden change in his professional life: in the spring of 1966, he was fired from Moscow State University's philology faculty after publicly coming to the defense of his former student, the writer Andrei Siniavskii, at a widely reported show trial. Duvakin joined forces with university students like Radzishevskii and his future wife, Marina Radzishevskaia, who helped the professor record, catalog, and transcribe some three hundred interviews. Radzishevskii's personal account of his time spent with Duvakin can be found in his article, Vladimir Radzishevskii, "Izgoi s dopotopnym magnitofonom: Zhizn΄ posle katastrofy," Znamia, no. 12 (2004), at https://znamlit.ru/publication.php?id=2531 (accessed January 9, 2024). 2. The Institute's website can be accessed at http://www.oralhistory.ru; it features nearly 100 interviews conducted by Duvakin and several other notable sound recordings. Many of the site's recordings have now been transcribed and translated into multiple language, and Shklovskii's interviews with Duvakin and Radzishevskii (https:// oralhistory.ru/talks/orh-814) were recently translated into English and annotated by the scholarly team of Slav Gratchev and Irina Evdokimova as Dialogues with Shklovsky: The

Nestandart: Zabytie eksperimenty v sovetskoi kul'ture, 1934-1964, 2021

The Russian Review, 2022

We hear it often: modernity teaches its inhabitants new techniques for vision. 1 These modern sub... more We hear it often: modernity teaches its inhabitants new techniques for vision. 1 These modern subjects, as we know, use their visual training to navigate the new optics linked with technologies, spaces, and aesthetic objects of their epoch. Yet by now, scholars working in the field of sound studies claim that accounts of the eye overlook the ear, a myopia that James Lastra has named the great "unthought" of modernity. 2 In the past two decades, I want to thank

Russian Review, 2023

In Recording Russia, Gabriella Safran tells a story about tools that made written records of oral... more In Recording Russia, Gabriella Safran tells a story about tools that made written records of oral speech, and about the listeners who used them. These technologies ranged from stenography to mass-produced paper, but Safran's subjects are not an obscure group of enthusiasts. Recording Russia positions literary stars like Dostoevsky and Turgenev alongside academics like Vladimir Dal' and Pavel Rybnikov, and it argues that these men constituted a "media generation," meaning that their attempts to capture, catalogue, and often invent the voice of an ethnically and nationally distinct Russian people was always in dialogue with new methods for recording speech. Across eight chapters headed by short, thematic titles ("Ringing," "Singing," and "Laughing," for example), Safran explores a habit that these men shared: each delighted in grabbing new or unfamiliar words from the everyday babble of a milieu other than their own, and then tried to find the perfect space for these words in literary or academic writing. Each listener, however, had remarkably different methods and aims. For example, Dal' produced a reference manual of the Russian language for a public that had long lacked one, but he often contorted the words of peasants into shapes more reminiscent of Moscow speech patterns. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, used excessively marked speech to boast about his expertise in depicting Russian class differences, but was criticized for doing so. Recording Russia thus asks a bigger question about what it means to listen to someone fundamentally different from you, and it points toward a pessimistic reality. Indeed, Safran suggests that the inherent malleability and instability of listening modes emblematizes this group's failure to adequately depict the real lives of people other than themselves. Accordingly, Safran's meticulously researched and impressively detailed chapters about each subject's thoughts on sound, listening, and speech become foundational for a larger claim about the more consequential development of national and ethnic identity in the Russian Empire. Safran's topic is regretfully timely: the war in Ukraine has brought many harsh realities into focus, but one is the unfortunate reminder that language politics remain contentious in Eastern Europe. Relatedly, one of Recording Russia's most important contributions is found in its introduction of thinkers from the field of linguistic anthropology like Asif Agha and Michael Silverstein to readers of Russian literary studies (who are still the primary audience for this book). This is a group that offers ideas which might become, as Safran shows, crucially helpful for our attempts to identify, critique, and ultimately de-center Russian notions of superiority from the Slavic field. Recording Russia will, however, propose an uncommon task to readers who keep up with studies of nineteenth-century literature. Safran wants us to entertain a truly material understanding of literature, made evident by the book's suggestion early on that literary composition is sometimes similar to the act of "recording sound on paper" (p. 3). Some readers might feel uncomfortable with this strippeddown approach, but Safran always shows that it is the key to unlocking the book's larger claims.

Review: Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos, 2020

Marx used the image of combustion to suggest that social change was inevitable, but he never aske... more Marx used the image of combustion to suggest that social change was inevitable, but he never asked if melting solids led to a sustainable path. Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos proposes that we scrutinize cultural modes of production-cinematic production, to be precise-for the Arctic region, where an excess of combustion has rendered melt far from metaphorical. Across 19 chapters and an introduction, the contributors and editors of Arctic Cinemas offer an ambitious new account of how documentary cinema and the Arctic have shaped each other. What results is a compelling, often archipelagic assemblage of essays that challenges norms in both cinema and area studies. The main contribution of Arctic Cinemas is a provocative idea: that "the Arctic is central to documentary film theory and history, yet until now, it has not been understood as such" (2). The volume's introduction convincingly shows that the Arctic has often served as the documentarian's muse, and as one could expect, many of its chapters make reference to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), the cinematic urtext of documentary misrepresentation. The opening intertitle of Flaherty's film exoticizes "mysterious Barren Lands" and a "desolate, boulderstrewn, wind-swept" landscape, but Artic Cinemas' contributors point out that the documentary's visual language has had a more lasting impact on the Arctic's cultural perception. Judy Wolfe's essay on Indigenous filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, for example, recalls how images of "crying" seals ("tears" protect the seal pups' eyes from the cold) aimed to shock the viewers of anti-fur documentaries in the 1970s and '80s, which mobilized boycotts that economically devastated the Inuit (275). Dominic Gagnon's recent, troubling film Of the North (2015) played for audiences an arrangement of Inuit "found footage" culled from social media, but Faye Ginsburg shows that the film reinforced its viewers' pervasive stereotypes. Clearly, the power of documentary film-and its potential for abuse-is still remarkably potent. Arctic Cinemas offers a corrective through the ultimate word in its title, ethos. Apropos of work on documentary ethics by Bill Nichols, the editors argue that ethical decisions inform every aspect of documentary filmmaking, which produces "artistic and ideological works, made to persuade audiences, engage in rhetoric, and, in particular, mobilize ethos." (12). This is not to say that all documentary is ethical-ethos articulates only what is at stake for the subjects, spectators, and makers of a documentary film. Every major era and mode of documentary, the editors write, has relied on the Arctic as a cinematic blank slate, allowing filmmakers to sculpt its visual carte blanche into fodder for their own ethical position. The cases most illustrative of this phenomenon include the cinema of Dziga Vertov, who used montage as a viable alternative for Flaherty's fractured gaze (in some cases, using Flaherty's own images); similarly, the latter third of Arctic Cinemas examines the work of contemporary Indigenous filmmakers, who have used documentary to respond to their routine misrepresentation. Although the "transnational, interdisciplinary" (2) approach of Arctic Cinemas suggests that area studies may suffer from a limited scope, the volume's vision is assembled mostly by area experts. Three essays are of particular interest for those who work inside the borders of the Eastern European and Eurasian field, and happily, they are among the volume's strongest entries. Lilya Kaganovsky's reading of Dziga Vertov's One Sixth of the World (1926) transfers Arctic Cinemas' concerns onto the Soviet cinema in a chapter that must be read alongside the volume's introduction for full effect. Kaganovsky suggests that Vertov's Arctic montage distinguished Soviet cinema as an inclusive space that created an ethnic Other both distant from and allied with its viewer, a technique which rendered cinema (in Vertov's eyes) as the only "tool by which these benefits were made tangible" (51). Jeremy Hicks demonstrates that Arctic visions from Cold War British and Soviet documentaries more fully illuminate the cultural myths of expansion and resource dominance that characterized this period. Oksana Sarkisova's history of doc