Dr Philip Cavendish

Head of Department; Senior Lecturer in Russian

Email
p.cavendish@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Phone Number
020 7679 8733

Fax
020 7679 8777

My route into academia was an unorthodox one. Reading the novels of Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina), Pasternak (Dr Zhivago) and Bulgakov (Master and Margarita), and watching the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Mirror, Stalker) as a teenager greatly excited my imagination. Since there was no possibility to study Russian at school, however, this remained very much a private passion. I studied history at Merton College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class degree, and subsequently developed a strong interest in political developments in Poland (the rise of Solidarność, the imposition of martial law, and the emergence of a political and cultural underground) to spend two years (1982-84) in Kraków. This gave rise to a life-long interest in Polish film and culture which has continued to this day. After my return from Poland, while working for two years as a journalist on a local London newspaper, I decided to attend evening classes in Russian, this leading in due course to an A-level. In 1989 I applied for and was awarded a British Academy grant to pursue doctoral studies at SSEES under the supervision of Professor Julian Graffy. My thesis - on the folk-religious contexts of twentieth-century Russian writer Evgenii Zamiatin's provincial stories and plays - was successfully defended in 1996. I was appointed Lecturer in Russian at SSEES in the same year.

Research Interests
My research interests have evolved greatly since my doctoral studies. Zamiatin's provincial stories are gems in terms of their rich colloquial language. Studying them closely was an educational process which taught me a great deal about peasant folk-religious culture and the roots of what became known in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critical discourse as 'literary Populism'. I was invited by the Modern Humanities and Research Association to publish my thesis in monograph form; this appeared in 2000. In the same year I was invited to contribute an essay on Zamiatin's hagiographical parodies for a multi-authored volume on the concept of demonism in Russian culture which was edited by Professor Pamela Davidson. Also in this same year I published a lengthy review of recent scholarship on Zamiatin for the Slavonic and East European Review. My interest in Pushkin, which arose as a result of teaching a special author course on his poetry and prose, gave rise to two articles on his lyric poetry, which appeared in 2000 in the same journal.

I have not abandoned literary research entirely, but my intellectual interests since 2000 have veered solidly towards cinema. This reflects a long-standing interest in Russian film which was sparked initially by the works of Tarkovsky, and then, during the perestroika period, by the showings of a number of films which had been banned during the period of Brezhnevite 'stagnation'. Since 2001 I have been studying the issue of visual style in Russian Cinema. In particular, I am interested in the creative role of camera operators in producing cinematic images and how this aspect of film-making has developed over time. I published a lengthy article in the Slavonic and East European Review on the poetics of the camera in pre-revolutionary Russian cinema in 2004. This was followed by an article on the theory and practice of camera operation within the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, which will appear in the October 2007 issue of the same journal. A monograph on the visual style of mainstream Soviet cinema during the 1920s will be published towards the end of 2007; this is the first in a new series which has recently been established within UCL. I have also recently published a short essay on Aleksandr Dovzhenko's film Earth for the Wallflower Press's 24 frames series on Russian Cinema, edited by Birgit Beumers.

I am a member of the editorial board of the Slavonic and East European Review, and am currently chair of the Russian Cinema Research Group.

Teaching and supervision
Since joining SSEES, I have taught a wide variety of language, literature and film courses. These include special courses on Pushkin and Tolstoi; Russian Short Prose; Russian Literature in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries; and Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature. I have been First Year Language Coordinator and taught the ab initio grammar course, as well as translation skills at every level of the degree programme. I also co-teach the translation and summary component of the MA Advanced Russian course. Along with Julian Graffy, I have developed a number of new film courses at SSEES and have also contributed to the MA Film Studies programme within UCL.

The courses I am teaching in the forthcoming academic year are:

• Pushkin (BA)
• Tolstoi (BA)
• Making of Modern Russian Culture (BA)
• Russian Cinema: Men and Women (BA)
• Russian Cinema: Innovation and Experiment (BA)
• Russian Cinema (1953-91) (MA)
• Russian Cinema (1991-2007) (MA)
• Advanced Russian (translation and summary) (MA)

Current Projects
Over the next two years I plan to complete a monograph on the 1920s avant-garde. This will be an in-depth study of the four key avant-garde director-cameraman partnerships during the 1920s: Eduard Tisse and Sergei Eizenshtein; Anatolii Golovnia and Vsevolod Pudovkin; Andrei Moskvin and the FEKS directors Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg; and Danylo Demutsky and Aleksandr Dovzhenko.

Links

Russian Cinema Research Group

Slavonic and East European Review

Recent Publications

This page last modified Wednesday 26 May 2010.