{"id":35431,"date":"2025-10-06T15:03:43","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T19:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/2025\/10\/06\/2025-martinsen-award-announcement\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T15:03:43","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T19:03:43","slug":"2025-martinsen-award-announcement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/2025-martinsen-award-announcement\/","title":{"rendered":"2025 Martinsen Award Announcement"},"content":{"rendered":"

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The North American Dostoevsky Society is delighted to announce that the 2025 Deborah A. Martinsen Conference Travel Award<\/a> goes to Nikolay Smirnov. <\/p>\n

Originally from Moscow, Russia, Nikolay moved to the United States to pursue his Bachelor\u2019s degree from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. After completing his studies at Emory, Nikolay pursued a PhD in Slavic Studies at Brown University, where he is currently a PhD candidate. In his research, Nikolay focuses on the role of ideas and ideals for the development of selfhood in Fyodor Dostoevsky\u2019s oeuvre, as well as late Soviet modernism and early postmodernism, particularly its propensity for intertextuality in the works of Venedikt Erofeev and Abram Terz.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the 2025 ASEEES Convention in Washington, DC, Nikolay will present a paper entitled \u201cThe Child in Krysztof Kieszlowski\u2019s \u2018Dekalog 1\u2019 and Fyodor Dostoevsky\u2019s: \u2018Brothers Karamazov\u2019: A Terrible Fate for the Gifted and Kind-Hearted?\u201d<\/p>\n

Abstract: Krsyztof Kieszlowski\u2019s Dekalog 1<\/em> and the chapter \u201cThe Boys\u201d in Fyodor Dostoevsky\u2019s Brothers Karamazov<\/em> both present a boy as their main protagonist. Pawe\u0142 in Dekalog 1<\/em> and Ilyusha Snegirev in \u201cThe Boys\u201d are children who hold a steadfast love for and a strong relationship with their fathers; Pawe\u0142\u2019s mother is, in fact, wholly absent from the picture. Pawe\u0142 and Ilyusha strike us as gifted in their mental capacities, drawing the viewer and the reader to perceive them as adults in children\u2019s bodies. In both pieces, the love for their fathers motivates the boys to take action \u2013 Ilusha to avenge his father\u2019s unfair treatment by Dmitry Karamazov and Pawe\u0142 to trust his father\u2019s judgement that the ice on the pond will not break. These actions directly or indirectly lead to the children\u2019s deaths, provoking us to ponder on the relationship between father and son and the experience of childhood as a whole in the Eastern European context. A century divides Kieszlowski\u2019s Dekalog 1<\/em> and Dostoevsky\u2019s Brothers Karamazov<\/em>, yet their portraits of the gifted child hint at uncanny similarities. This paper aims to analyze these two representations of childhood in the respective works and answer questions about the uniqueness of the childhood experience in the Eastern European context. Why do these children appear aged beyond their years and receive tragic fates? What is it about the nature of Polish film and Russian literature that leads to the portrayal of such distinctly memorable children?<\/p>\n

The paper is scheduled for 8am on the Friday on the panel \u201cRepresentations of Childhood in Russian and Polish Films.\u201d<\/p>\n

Congratulations to Nikolay Smirnov!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement\u00a0here. The North American Dostoevsky Society is delighted to announce that the 2025 Deborah A. Martinsen Conference Travel Award goes to Nikolay Smirnov. Originally from Moscow, Russia, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340,"featured_media":35432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bloggers-karamazov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dostoevsky.org\/society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}