On Saturday, September 14, Dr. Leonid Livak presented “Russia Abroad in the Wake of the Second World War” as a part of the Russian History Museum’s Second Saturday online lecture series.

Dr. Leonid Livak explored the least known page in the history of the First-Wave Russian emigration, or “Russia Abroad,” namely its precipitous decline as a transnational cultural community in the 1940s.

About the Speaker

Leonid Livak is Professor at the University of Toronto's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Centre for Jewish Studies. His research focuses on the literary and cultural history of the First-Wave Russian emigration ("Russia Abroad"), on Russian and transnational modernism, on the history of Russian-French intellectual and literary contacts and transfers, as well as on the cultural history of Jews in modern Europe.

His books include: How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism (2003) ; The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature (2010); Literaturnyi avangard russkogo Parizha (2014); Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France (2010); In Search of Russian Modernism (2018); Zhila-byla perevodchitsa: Liudmila Savitskaia i Konstantin Bal'mont (2020). Leonid Livak is currently writing a cultural history of the end of Russia Abroad in the 1940s.