A lovely moment I recall. By Eva Spier  Illustration by Jiaying Geng In 1825, Alexander Pushkin, widely regarded as the father of Russian poetry and memorized by legions of pupils to this day, joined Russian socialite Anna Kern at her aunt’s Trigorskoye estate near Mikhaylovskoye to work on his manuscript of Eugene Onegin . He became infatuated with the woman in a matter of weeks, who had been unhappily married to General Yermolai Kern by ways of an arranged marriage since th

By Eva Spier Illustration by Derin Ogutcu The Columbia students who dare stray into the Russian department—further than the mandatory two-year language requirement—gather in single-digit numbers in Hamilton classrooms to revel in declensions and verbs of motion. Every two years, these students are offered a literature seminar devoted to foundational scary stories in the Russian tradition, conducted entirely in Russian. I wade through these texts with my classmates under the g

The Choice We All Make: Campus Politics and Self Definition. By Eva Spier Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner — — —  “The remaking of life!...