Kevin M F Platt
Biographic Data
| ID | 335335 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin M F Platt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin M F |
| FAMILY NAME | Platt |
| SIGNATURE | PLATT K M F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires
Since the collapse of the Cold War global order in 1991, the study of Eastern European and Eurasian societies and cultures has emerged by stages from the isolation and particularity fostered by the area-studies geographical boundaries of the past. The siloing of scholars and methods applied to the “second,” or state socialist, world, in distinction from the “first” and “third” worlds, shaped not only the study of the “era of three worlds” itself …
Culture, Imperialism, and the Other Russias
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted calls for canceling Russian cultural figures, both contemporary and historical, who are denounced as mouthpieces of imperialist aggression. Even if justified in some cases, such sweeping condemnations overlook diverse Russian voices and identities
On The Subjects and Objects of Decolonization
This response to Dace Dzenovska's article "Emptiness Against Decolonization" engages with her account of the social and political experience of the residents of "Lielciems" in eastern Latvia, describing it as a form of inter-imperiality, which has been defined by Laura Doyle as the "fraught condition" shaped by "multiple vectored relations among empires and among those who endure and maneuver among empires."1 In the case of Lielciems, the contrad…
Mama is laughing haha
"Mama is laughing haha ..." Egana Dzhabbarova (bio) Translated by Elina Alter (bio), Hilah Kohen (bio), Mark Lipovetsky (bio), and Kevin M. F. Platt (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Linor Goralik, Trinity in Bucha (2022), black cardboard, gold, white, and red paper, black watercolor, black thread, bandage, red acrylic, pen / Courtesy of the artist / linorgoralik.com mama is laughing hahapapa is laughing hahayou sound so funny in A…
The Russophone Literature of Resistance: Introduction
The Russophone Literature of ResistanceIntroduction Mark Lipovetsky (bio) and Kevin M. F. Platt (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Citizen-activist Evgenia Isayeva doused herself with red paint as part of the "Heart Bleeds" action near the Duma Tower, St. Petersburg, Russia, March 27, 2022. Her banner reads: "My heart bleeds. / I sense that it is pointless to make an appeal to reason, so I appeal to your hearts. / Every day in Ukrai…
Two Russian Poems from Saint Petersburg and Tbilisi
Two Russian Poems from Saint Petersburg and Tbilisi Alexander Skidan (bio) and Linor Goralik (bio) Translated by Kevin M. F. Platt (bio) and Ivan Sokolov (bio) "too late to scroll through news and facebook ..." too late to scroll through news and facebook too late to write on personaland collective guilt too late to read hannah arendt and carl schmitt both in love with schwarzwaldtoo late to become provost of the state of emergency too late to st…
From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds
By coincidence, it seems, the critical vocabulary and concerns that came to be known as postcolonial theory and methodology rose to be a dominant school of inquiry in the Anglo-American academy in the same years that the Soviet Union collapsed (notwithstanding that key theoretical texts by Frantz Fanon and others predated this moment by decades). Yet, oddly, postcolonialist terms were seldom applied to postsocialist and post-Soviet cases until th…
A Ransomed Dissident: A Life in Art under the Soviets
The persecuted Soviet author and, eventually, Parisian émigré Andrey Sinyavsky (who used the pen name Abram Tertz) once pronounced that his quarrel with the Soviet state concerned aesthetics rather than politics. His longtime friend Igor Golomstock (1929–2017) concurred with Sinyavsky's position, as he announces at several moments in this account of a remarkable life that extends from early experiences as the child of non-prisoner civilians worki…
Over Hill and Dale in Pursuit of the Russian Fox: 3Rd Contribution to the Forum about Jeffrey Brooks’ The Firebird and the Fox
Jeffrey Brooks’ book The Firebird and the Fox presents a synthetic account of Russian cultural history from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Brooks describes culture as an “ecosystem,” persistent across seeming moments of historical rupture such as the revolutions of 1917, animated by certain overarching thematic concerns, and uniting readers and writers across a broad spectrum of levels of social life, from th…
Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika by Barbara Martin
Reviewed by: Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika by Barbara Martin Kevin M. F. Platt Martin, Barbara–Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 293. In late 1965, the historian Aleksandr Nekrich published a short book, aimed at a broad readership, concerning the Nazi invasion of the USSR entitled June 22, 1941. Nekrich held a posit…
Entangled histories in Eastern Europe: Complementary occlusions and interlocking extremes in Baltic-Russian memory conflicts
Eastern Europe is the scene of multiple memory conflicts, especially between the Russian Federation and other regional states. Typically, analyses of these conflicts examine contradictions between opposed accounts, critique distortions of the historical record, and attempt to establish corrected narratives. Instead, the present article examines how seemingly incommensurate accounts may be elements of larger structures of entangled mutual reinforc…
This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia by Joan Neuberger
Book Review| April 01 2020 This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia by Joan Neuberger Neuberger, Joan, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 404 pp. Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2020) 26 (2): 361. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8192920 Cite Icon Cit…
Latvia's Russian Questions
Many ethnic Russians in the Baltic state are still excluded from full citizenship and tend to be susceptible to Moscow's influence through cross-border media
The World's Central Asian Heart
Research Article| August 01 2018 The World’s Central Asian Heart: The Poetry of Shamshad Abdullaev Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (3): 461–463. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-6940478 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kevin M. F. Platt; The World’s Central Asian Heart: The Poetry of Shamshad A…
Communion
Research Article| January 01 2018 Communion Keti Chukhrov Keti Chukhrov Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (1): 130–148. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4253902 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Keti Chukhrov; Communion. Common Knowledge 1 January 2018; 24 (1): 130–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4253902 Download citation…
Keti Chukhrov's Theater of Communion
Research Article| January 01 2018 Keti Chukhrov’s Theater of Communion Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (1): 126–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4253890 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kevin M. F. Platt; Keti Chukhrov’s Theater of Communion. Common Knowledge 1 January 2018; 24 (1): 126–12…
Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy
Book Review| April 01 2017 Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy Gardner, Anthony, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 337 pp. Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2017) 23 (2): 353. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3815954 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Perm…
Alexander Lyon Macfie, editor. The Fiction of History
It has been nearly a half century since the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe in 1973, the event that signaled a rising critique of historiographical accounts as being akin or, at least, comparable to fiction. In the following decades, debates over this and related questions among philosophers of history and historians developed into a coherent subfield. The volume under review brin…
Pasternak in Revolution: Lyric Temporality and the Intimization of History
Looking at the Around
Secret Speech: Wounding, Disavowal, and Social Belonging in the USSR
Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy
Only connect ...," the epigraph of Forster's Howards End, offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection-whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations-in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel's conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conv…
Lyric Cosmopolitanism in a Postsocialist Borderland
Latvia presents a unique and counterintuitive case in the history of postsocialist ethnic relations. Despite the USSR's having annexed Latvia by fiat and armed force in the 1940s-and despite the population transfers of so many Russians and other Soviet peoples to the region that Latvians themselves nearly became an ethnic minority in "their own" republic-there has been no ethnic violence between Latvians and Russians in the postsocialist era. Yet…
Russian Empire of Pop: Post-Socialist Nostalgia and Soviet Retro at the "New Wave" Competition
The article is an analysis of the "New Wave International Competition of Young Performers of Popular Music," a televised spectacle in the music format of "estrada" ("stage song"), that has been held in Jurmala, Latvia, since 2002. The competition is discussed in terms of the history of its Soviet predecessor, the "Jurmala" competition that was held from 1985-1989 in the same concert hall, involving many of the same figures who organized "New Wave…
Thirteen Russophone Poems from Latvia
Other| April 01 2013 Thirteen Russophone Poems from Latvia Sergej Timofejev; Sergej Timofejev Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Semyon Khanin; Semyon Khanin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Artur Punte Artur Punte Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2013) 19 (2): 318–333. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2073339 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twi…
Russian Empire of Pop: Post-Socialist Nostalgia and Soviet Retro at the "New Wave" Competition
The article is an analysis of the "New Wave International Competition of Young Performers of Popular Music," a televised spectacle in the music format of "estrada" ("stage song"), that has been held in Jurmala, Latvia, since 2002. The competition is discussed in terms of the history of its Soviet predecessor, the "Jurmala" competition that was held from 1985-1989 in the same concert hall, involving many of the same figures who organized "New Wave…
Secret Speech: Wounding, Disavowal, and Social Belonging in the USSR
Entangled histories in Eastern Europe: Complementary occlusions and interlocking extremes in Baltic-Russian memory conflicts
Eastern Europe is the scene of multiple memory conflicts, especially between the Russian Federation and other regional states. Typically, analyses of these conflicts examine contradictions between opposed accounts, critique distortions of the historical record, and attempt to establish corrected narratives. Instead, the present article examines how seemingly incommensurate accounts may be elements of larger structures of entangled mutual reinforc…
Terribly Romantic, Terribly Progressive, or Terribly Tragic: Rehabilitating Ivan IV under I.V. Stalin
The World's Central Asian Heart
Research Article| August 01 2018 The World’s Central Asian Heart: The Poetry of Shamshad Abdullaev Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (3): 461–463. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-6940478 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kevin M. F. Platt; The World’s Central Asian Heart: The Poetry of Shamshad A…
History, Inertia, and the Unexpected: Recycling Russia's Despots
Book Review| January 01 2004 History, Inertia, and the Unexpected: Recycling Russia's Despots Sergei F. Platonov, Ivan Groznyi, 1530-1584 [Ivan the Terrible, 1530-1584] (1923), Robert Iu. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [Ivan the Terrible]; (1922), both reissued in one volume, edited by Dmitrii M. Volodikhin (Moscow: Universitet Rossiiskoi akademii obrazovaniia, 1998), 221 pp.Aleksei N. Tolstoi, Petr I [Peter I](Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 2000), 656 pp. Kevin M. …
Metapoesis: The Russian Tradition from Pushkin to Chekhov
History and Despotism, or: Hayden White vs. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great
Terribly Romantic, Terribly Progressive, or Terribly Tragic: Rehabilitating Ivan IV under I.V. Stalin
A Little Corner of Freedom in Russia
The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen
Attempting to indoctrinate the public into a new society, the Bolsheviks staged - legal trials that incorporated theatrical elements such as coached defendants, memorized scripts for confession, and gruelling interrogatory rehearsals. This genre of legal spectacle, whose origins lay in Soviet theatre and cinema of the 1920s, moved from mass public spectacles to the courtroom, as the Bolsheviks sought to effect ever greater social change. In this …
The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change
Book Review| January 01 2003 The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2003) 9 (1): 161. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9-1-161 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kevin M. F. Platt; The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. Common Knowledge…
History, Inertia, and the Unexpected: Recycling Russia's Despots
Book Review| January 01 2004 History, Inertia, and the Unexpected: Recycling Russia's Despots Sergei F. Platonov, Ivan Groznyi, 1530-1584 [Ivan the Terrible, 1530-1584] (1923), Robert Iu. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [Ivan the Terrible]; (1922), both reissued in one volume, edited by Dmitrii M. Volodikhin (Moscow: Universitet Rossiiskoi akademii obrazovaniia, 1998), 221 pp.Aleksei N. Tolstoi, Petr I [Peter I](Moscow: EKSMO-Press, 2000), 656 pp. Kevin M. …
Will the Study of Russian Literature Survive the Coming Century? (A Provocation)
Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda
A poem about Lillebror and Karlsson
NB: Karlsson on the Roof and its sequels , the children's books by Astrid Lindgren (best known in the English-speaking world for her Pippi Longstocking), are immensely popular in Russia, where they served as the basis for a beloved cartoon series. Their main characters are a little boy called Lillebror (Junior) and a chubby little man named Karlsson who lives on the roof Karlsson flies by means of a propeller on his back, activated by a special b…
Truths
Truths Sergej Timofejev I wanttotellyousimple truths, Revealimportant things toyou. Alwaysopendoors, stepintoelevators, Goupstairs, movedowncorridors. Alwaysgetintocars, start theengine, Andifit'swinter, waituntil itwarms up. Alwaysspendmoney, butsparingly, Andonlyonceina whilespendeverything you'vegot. Insummer itwillbesummer; infallitwillbefall, Don'tgetflustered; don'tdo anything that disgusts you. Girls willbecomeyoung women, andthen you'llno…
Poetry in the Cloud: An Experiment, Results, and n+1 Hypotheses
MM jJB The happy, lowing seven pages twenty-first poems are published the century offspring on union the of fol- a lowingpages are the offspring of a happy,twenty-first century union betweenthe ancientart of poetryand the Internet. In March2011twenty or so Russian and American poets,scholars, and translators assembled virtually - via a document cloud toworkonnewtranslations from Russianinto Englishand vice versa.This groupbrought together individ…
Artemis
POST-SOVIET LITERATURE Artemis Viktor Ivaniv Thecity as though laidoutinmypalm AndI passedthrough allmyoldhaunts I tookoff easilyinyouth Thoughts hungina beatofeasydoubt LikeshadesofAladdin'swould-be uncle Runinfour directions Likespectral American werewolves Youricefloeroof issplitting Andwhenyoupulltheleverofthefire alarm Theelevator willdescendreleasing Intotheranks ofyourChaldeanarmies Intoourfull-dress Vietnam No person, nopillaroflight, the…
Russian Empire of Pop: Post-Socialist Nostalgia and Soviet Retro at the "New Wave" Competition
The article is an analysis of the "New Wave International Competition of Young Performers of Popular Music," a televised spectacle in the music format of "estrada" ("stage song"), that has been held in Jurmala, Latvia, since 2002. The competition is discussed in terms of the history of its Soviet predecessor, the "Jurmala" competition that was held from 1985-1989 in the same concert hall, involving many of the same figures who organized "New Wave…
Thirteen Russophone Poems from Latvia
Other| April 01 2013 Thirteen Russophone Poems from Latvia Sergej Timofejev; Sergej Timofejev Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Semyon Khanin; Semyon Khanin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Artur Punte Artur Punte Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2013) 19 (2): 318–333. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2073339 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twi…
Introduction: A Motto for Moral Diplomacy
Only connect ...," the epigraph of Forster's Howards End, offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection-whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations-in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel's conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conv…
Lyric Cosmopolitanism in a Postsocialist Borderland
Latvia presents a unique and counterintuitive case in the history of postsocialist ethnic relations. Despite the USSR's having annexed Latvia by fiat and armed force in the 1940s-and despite the population transfers of so many Russians and other Soviet peoples to the region that Latvians themselves nearly became an ethnic minority in "their own" republic-there has been no ethnic violence between Latvians and Russians in the postsocialist era. Yet…
Alexander Lyon Macfie, editor. The Fiction of History
It has been nearly a half century since the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe in 1973, the event that signaled a rising critique of historiographical accounts as being akin or, at least, comparable to fiction. In the following decades, debates over this and related questions among philosophers of history and historians developed into a coherent subfield. The volume under review brin…
Pasternak in Revolution: Lyric Temporality and the Intimization of History
Looking at the Around
Secret Speech: Wounding, Disavowal, and Social Belonging in the USSR
Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy
Book Review| April 01 2017 Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy Gardner, Anthony, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 337 pp. Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2017) 23 (2): 353. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3815954 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Perm…
The World's Central Asian Heart
Research Article| August 01 2018 The World’s Central Asian Heart: The Poetry of Shamshad Abdullaev Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (3): 461–463. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-6940478 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kevin M. F. Platt; The World’s Central Asian Heart: The Poetry of Shamshad A…
Communion
Research Article| January 01 2018 Communion Keti Chukhrov Keti Chukhrov Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (1): 130–148. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4253902 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Keti Chukhrov; Communion. Common Knowledge 1 January 2018; 24 (1): 130–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4253902 Download citation…
Keti Chukhrov's Theater of Communion
Research Article| January 01 2018 Keti Chukhrov’s Theater of Communion Kevin M. F. Platt Kevin M. F. Platt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (1): 126–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4253890 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kevin M. F. Platt; Keti Chukhrov’s Theater of Communion. Common Knowledge 1 January 2018; 24 (1): 126–12…
History (26 works) · Art (24 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Literature (17 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Art history (9 works)