Two Hongor Oulanoff Memorial Lectures have come and gone since our last newsletter. Dr. Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University) presented the 2018 lecture "Soviet Things and Post-Soviet People: How to View Socialist History Now" on October 5, 2018, and Dr. Stephanie Sandler (Harvard University) gave the 2019 lecture “Russia Will Be Free: Recent Poems by Russian Women” on October 25, 2019. Both lectures brought together students and scholars from different departments and centers from across the university.
Dr. Hongor Oulanoff (1929-2010) was one of the founding professors of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University, where he served from 1963 until his retirement in 1991. After receiving his PhD in Russian Literature from Harvard University in 1960, Professor Oulanoff taught at Harvard (1960-1961) and at Vanderbilt University (1961-1963). When he became professor of Russian Literature at The Ohio State University in 1963, he was one of the youngest scholars ever to be appointed to the rank of full professor. A gentle, dedicated, caring teacher, Professor Oulanoff inspired many students with his love of Russian and Soviet literature and supervised several doctoral dissertations. His books, The Serapion Brothers: Theory and Practice (Mouton 1966), and The Prose Fiction of Veniamin A. Kaverin (Slavica 1976), have become the standard works on these early Soviet writers. Mrs. Constance Oulanoff, Dr. Oulanoff’s wife, has generously endowed a fund to honor Professor Oulanoff’s memory and to perpetuate his devotion to Russian Literature through an annual lecture at The Ohio State University.
