Please join Tamizdat Project for a preview screening of Rock. Paper. Scissors (dir. Anton Zhelnov and Anna Narinskaya | 2023 | 95 min | produced by MART Foundation), a documentary about the legendary Ardis Publishers and its cofounders Carl and Ellendea Proffer! The screening will be followed by a conversation with Anna Narinskaya, moderated by Yasha Klots (Hunter College CUNY & Tamizdat Project).
Proceeds from the ticket sales for this event will go towards covering the costs of a Tamizdat Project Summer Workshop. The workshop will enable the project's interns and student volunteers, including those displaced by war or repressions, to concentrate on researching state censorship and banned books.
About the Event
Founded in 1971 by Carl and Ellendea Proffer in Ann Arbor, MI, Ardis Publishers specialized in “contraband” twentieth-century Russian literature from the Silver Age to perestroika. Most of the books Ardis published were banned, censored or never submitted for publication in the Soviet Union and could only reach their target audience through tamizdat. Ardis brought out titles both in the original Russian and in English translation, familiarizing the American public with masterpieces of Russian literature from behind the Iron Curtain, and the Russian émigré readers with works they would not have been able to read otherwise. Ardis authors included Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Fazil Iskander, Vasily Aksenov, Sasha Sokolov, and many others.
Rock. Paper. Scissors is a film about two Americans who changed the history of Russian literature. It tells the story of a small press from the Midwest that managed to make banned literary voices heard across borders, not only in the West, but also in the Soviet Union itself. The film is not only a look back onto the past, but a compelling case study for the present, when censorship in Russia is back and many Russian authors, as well as the readers, have yet again found themselves in emigration, especially since February 24, 2022.
Anna Narinskaya is a Russian journalist, curator, documentary filmmaker and playwright. She has contributed to Russia’s most influential media since the late nineties, notably as a special correspondent for Kommersant, covering cultural and social issues, and as a literary editor. After Russia annexed Crimea and state censorship intensified, Narinskaya moved to fully independent media, such as Novaya Gazeta and TV Rain, and began curating exhibitions. Her best known projects include 200 Hits a Minute. Typewriter and Consciousness of the 20th Century (Moscow, 2015), Last address. Commemorating Repressions in Today’s Russia (Moscow 2018, Berlin 2019). Find a Jew. Soviet Jews as a Social and Cultural Phenomenon (Moscow, 2020), and Museum of Joseph Brodsky (St Petersburg, 2020). Anna Narinskaya is the author of another documentary, Find a Jew. In Search of Hidden Identity in the USSR (2022). In the summer of 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Narinskaya left the country and has been living in Berlin. In December 2022, her play The Last Word about women political prisoners in today’s Russia premiered on the stage of the Gorki Theatre in Berlin.