National Endowment for the Humanities Symposium

Chekhov the Immigrant: Translating a Cultural Icon
Friday-Saturday, October 8-9, 2004
Roberts Union
Colby College —Waterville, Maine

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Friday, October 8

8:30 a.m.: Opening Remarks

Welcome to Colby: President William Adams Opening remarks: Julie de Sherbinin & Michael Finke

8:45-10:15 a.m.: Chekhov’s Poetics

Savely Senderovich, Cornell University Two Opposing Approaches to the Problem Incidental Detail in Chekhov’s Poetics Robert Louis Jackson, Yale University "Rothschild’s Fiddle Revisited" Gary Saul Morson, Northwestern University "Chekhov’s Poetics of the Prosaic"

10:30-12:00: Chekhov and American Culture

Julie de Sherbinin, Colby College "American Iconography of Chekhov" Katherine O’Connor, Boston University "Writing in English with a Chekhov Muse" Andrew Durkin, Indiana University "Hunters Off the Beaten Track: The Dismantling of Pastoral Myth in Chekhov and Crane"

1:30-3:30 p.m. Translation Roundtable: Chekhov’s Prose in American English

Peter Constantine, New York Richard Pevear, Paris Larissa Volokhonsky, Paris Discussant Carol Flath, Duke University "Chekhov in the Afterworld: the Life Translations"

4:00-6:00 p.m.: Chekhov and American Writing

James McConkey, Cornell University Claire Messud, Novelist Francine Prose, Writer and Essayist James Wood, The New Republic

 

Saturday, October 9

8:30-10:00 a.m.: Doctor/Patient, Author/Reader Conflicting & Conflating Identities

Cathy Popkin, Columbia University "Doctor Without Patients/Man Without a Spleen: Chekhov’s Practice" Michael Finke, Washington University in St. Louis "Heal Thyself, Hide Thyself: Reading Dr. Chekhov’s Body" Conevery Bolton Valencius, Independent Scholar "Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island as Medical Geography"

10:15-12:30: Seminar in the Medical Humanities Sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council

Keynote address: Dr. Robert Coles, Harvard University "Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams" Participatory seminar analyzing selected stories by Chekhov, led by Dr. Richard Kahn & Michael Finke

1:30-2:30 p.m.: Drama and Translation

Keynote address: Laurence Senelick, Tufts University "Seeing Chekhov Whole"

2:45-4:30 p.m.: Chekhov and Drama

Svetlana Evdokimova, Brown University "Chekhov’s Trouble with Theatre: The Undramatic Drama" Sharon Carnicke, University of Southern California "The Nasty Habit of Adapting Chekhov’s Plays" Spencer Golub, Brown University "Catastrophe (Obsessive Compulsive Modes in Chekhov and His Plays)" Anna Muza, University of California at Berkeley "The Sound of Distant Thunder: Chekhov’s Theater in Stoppard’s Trilogy"

4:45-6:00 p.m.: Forum on Performance Practice

Michael Heim, University of California at Los Angeles "Translating Chekhov’s Plays: Collaboration in the Theater" Carol Rocamora, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University "Must there be a cherry orchard?: Directors' perceptions of Chekhov" Alexander Popov, Moscow Art Theatre Ellen Beckerman, Lightbox Theatre (Manhattan)