Meanings and Values of Water in Russian Culture

Jane Costlow is the Clark A. Griffiths Professor of Environmental Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, USA. Her scholarly work has focused primarily on nineteenth-century Russian literature and visual culture, ranging from the novels of Ivan Turgenev to writing by Russian women writers and representations of the bear in late Imperial culture. Recent publications include Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the 19th century Forest (Cornell University Press, 2013) and, with Amy Nelson, Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). At Bates she teaches courses in Environmental Humanities and Russian Literature, interests reflected in recent papers and conference presentations on disaster narratives in film and oral history. Her translation of Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal's The Tragic Menagerie received the AATSEEL prize for best translation in 1999.Arja Rosenholm is Professor of Russian Language and Culture at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include the history of Russian literature and culture, gender studies, Russian popular culture and mass media, ecocriticism, space, and culture. She is currently heading the Academy of Finland-funded project Water as Cultural Space: Changing Values and Representations (2012-2016). Rosenholm has edited several scholarly volumes in English, Russian, and Finnish, and published numerous peer-reviewed articles in international and national journals. Recent books include Women in Russian Cultural History (in Finnish), with Suvi Salmenniemi and Marja Sorvari. (Gaudeamus, 2014), and Topografii populiarnoi kul'tury together with Irina Savkina. (NLO, 2015).