“Literature of Ravines: Bearing Witness Inside and Outside the USSR.”
Professional Background
Mrs. Assia Kovrigina is a PhD candidate in literature at the University of Paris VII: Denis Diderot (France). She possesses skills in Russian, French, and English. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Mrs. Kovrigina will be working her project “Literature of Ravines: Bearing Witness Inside and Outside the USSR.”
Mrs. Kovrigina authored the book, Literature of Ravines: Testimony and Shoah in the Soviet Union, 2013, and various articles including, “Babin Yar in personal accounts”, in Babin Yar, History and Memory, in 2016, as well as “Eyewitnessing the destruction of Jews in the URSS: talk by the delegation, bear witness against the odds”, in 2016. Two of Mrs. Kovrigina’s conference papers include “Reconstruction of Memory and of Holocaust Literature in Russia” given at a conference in Strasbourg, January 2013, and “Testimonial Literature in the URSS: Censorship and Self-censorship” at the Methodological Problems in Researching the History of Soviet Jews During the Holocaust Conference at Yad Vashem in December of 2011.
Fellowship Research
For her Diane and Howard Wohl Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Mrs. Kovrigina used the personal documents of Macha Rolnikaite, Khayim Beider, and other Soviet writers, as well as accounts by the nevozvrashchentsy to compare the texts written inside the USSR with those written outside of the USSR as a way to discern the effects that influenced testimonial writing under Soviet dictatorship.
Mrs. Assia Kovrigina was in residence at the Mandel Center until January 30, 2016.