On Wednesday evening, October 15, the Dickinson Department of Russian welcomed Kerry Philben, doctoral candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, who delivered a talk entitled “Music at Home in the Russian Realist Novel.” Kerry emphasized the role of domestic music-making, especially if performed by women, as a point of intersection between private and public spheres of behavior in classical Russian novels, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children and A Nest of Gentlefolk. The lecture was offered in the context of Prof. Cassio de Oliveira’s seminar “Life’s Accursed Questions: Russian Literature through the Nineteenth-Century.”
