Faculty

Biography

John Givens's first book, Prodigal Son: Vasilii Shukshin in Soviet Russian Culture, examined the life and works of one of the most popular Soviet artist to emerge in the post-Stalin period. A prolific actor, director, and writer whose life and works were a study in border crossing between artistic genres, cultural strata, political camps, and demographic divisions, Shukshin altered important paradigms through which we have traditionally understood Soviet writers and Soviet literature. In addition to his monograph on Shukshin, Givens co-translated a volume of his prose, titled Stories from a Siberian Village. The anthology is the most comprehensive collection of Shukshin's stories to appear in English and reflects Givens's interest in the art of translation. From 1999 to 2016, Givens also served as editor of Russian Studies in Literature, a quarterly journal of translations from the Russian literary press.

His second book, The Image of Christ in Russian Literature, focuses on the four authors who most famously imaged Christ in their works: Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy in the nineteenth century and Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak in the twentieth. These authors all felt a need to speak about Christ in an age of unbelief but, at the same time, paradoxically affirmed him or his teachings through indirect or even negative means. The subject of the book is thus not so much Russia's Christian literature but rather its anxiety over its Christian heritage, specifically, its anxiety over the meaning and significance of Jesus Christ.

Givens is currently working on a study provisionally titled The Anxiety of Belief in Russian Cinema. His multi-disciplinary investigation of religion and religious belief on Russian silver screens, both during the short Soviet century and in the post-Soviet, post-secular period since 1991, will be the first monograph on this topic in Russian studies. Different "anxieties of belief" are analyzed, including: films commissioned to discredit religion in the 1920s and 1960s; films by Andrei Tarkovsky in the 1960s and 1970s that deploy film grammar in service of indirect representations of the inbreaking of the sacred or transcendent (hierophanies) into the material(ist) world; two post-Soviet devotional Bible movies (still a rare phenomenon in post-secular Russia); and Kirill Serebrennikov's 2016 depiction of religious fanaticism as a form of male hysteria projected onto queer bodies (The Student), among other case studies.

Research Overview

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"What is belief in a secular age?"

University of Rochester Newscenter article, 12/5/18

John Givens and John Michael are Rochester scholars whose work explores how sweeping cultural and technological changes influenced the works of iconic writers. And while their latest books focus separately on the giants of Russian and American literature—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allen Poe, Mikhail Bulgakov, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Leo Tolstoy—they both ask what religious belief might look like in an age of science and secularism.

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The image of Christ in Dostoevsky’s Russia

A talk delivered at Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History, American University, March 19, 2021

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Ivan Karamazov's via negativa in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov

Talk given at the Herzen State Pedagogical University, Saint Petersburg, Russia, March 12, 2019.

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The Christological Function of Comedy in Dostoevsky's Idiot

Talk given at the Dostoevsky Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia, March 15, 2019.

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John Givens, “The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018) | New Books Network

In The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Dr. John Givens of the University of Rochester discusses classics of Russian literature such as The Brothers Karamazov and Dr. Zhivago, as well as texts of less renown to English-speaking audiences, such as Tolstoy’s Resurrection.

newbooksnetwork.com

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Research Interests

• Russian language and literature
• Russian film
• translation

Courses Offered (subject to change)

• CLTR 389:  Research Seminar (Fall 2020)
• RUSS 101:  Elementary Russian I (Fall)
• RUSS 102:  Elementary Russian II (Spring)
• RUSS 128:  Russian Civilization: Myth, Culture, History (Fall 2026)
• RUSS 231:  Great Russian Writers (Fall 2016)
• RUSS 235:  Tolstoy's "War and Peace" (Fall 2024)
• RUSS 237:  Dostoevsky (Spring 2026)
• RUSS 265:  Russian Literature Between the Revolutions (Spring 2014)
• RUSS 267:  Russia Goes to the Movies (Spring 2016)

Selected Publications

Books

• The Image of Christ in Russian Literature. Northern Illinois UP, 2018.
• Prodigal Son: Vasilii Shukshin in Soviet Russian Culture. Northwestern UP, 2000. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory.
• With Laura Michael (Givens), translators. Stories from a Siberian Village. By Vasily Shukshin, Northern Illinois UP, 1996.

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Silence as Cinematic Device in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 19.2 (June 2025). DOI: 1080/17503132.2025.2481666.
• “Belief as Homosexual Panic in Kirill Serebrennikov’s Uchenik(The Student, 2016).” Forthcoming, Slavic and East European Journal, 69:2 (Summer, 2025).
• "Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy: The Limits of Language," Institute of Art and Ideas News, 25th September 2024.
• Dostoevsky’s Narratives of (un)Belief: From Psychology to Theology,” An Unexpected Journal, 6:4 (2023) 15-39. https://anunexpectedjournal.com/dostoevskys-narratives-of-unbelief-from-psychology-to-theology/
• Via negativa Ивана Карамазова: размышления над романом Ф.М. Достоевского Братья Карамазовы» (Ivan Karamazov's via negativa: On Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov), Линтула: Сборник научных статей (annual publication of the Konstantino-Eleninsky Monastery, St. Petersburg, Russia) 12 (2019): 52-60.
• "Shakespearean Tragedy in Russian: In Equal Scale Weighing Delight and Dole." The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 761-78. Oxford Handbooks.
• "Tolstoy's Jesus Versus Dostoevsky's Christ: A Tale of Two Christologies." From Russia with Love Symposium Proceedings, 18 Apr. 2013, RIT Scholar Works, 2014, pp. 13-26.
• Introduction, annotation, and bibliography. "Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhailovich." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, vol. 257, Gale, 2012, pp. 137-215.
• "A Narrow Escape into Faith? Dostoevsky's Idiot and the Christology of Comedy." Russian Review, vol. 70, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 95-117. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9434.2011.00599.x.
• "Divine Love in War and Peace and Anna Karenina." Записки русской академической группы в США [Transactions of the Association of Russian American Scholars in the USA], no. 36, 2010, pp. 165-90.
• "The Fiction of Fact and the Fact of Fiction: Hayden White and War and Peace." Tolstoy Studies Journal, vol. 21, 2009, pp. 15-32.
• "Screening the Short Story: The Films of Vasilii Shukshin." Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900-2001: Screening the Word, edited by Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski, Routledge, 2005, pp. 116-32. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies 18.
• “Vasilii Shukshin,” Russian Prose Writers After WWII, vol. 302 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Christine A. Rydel, (Columbia, SC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2004) 266-79.
• “Vsevolod Garshin,” Russian Literature in the Age of Realism, vol. 277 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Alyssa W. Dinega (Columbia, SC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2003), 128-40.
• Call Me to the Bright Beyond: Cultural Mobility and the Landscape of Longing in the Works of Vasilii Shukshin,” Russian Studies in Literature, “Rereading Russian Writers” Issue, 37:3 (Summer, 2001) 60-77. REPRINTED in V.M. Shukshin: Problemy i resheniia, ed. O.G. Levashova (Barnaul: Altaiskii universitet, 2002), 40-55.
• "Vasilii Shukshin and the 'Audience of Millions': Kalina krasnaia and the Power of Popular Cinema." Russian Review, vol. 58, no. 2, 1999, pp. 268-85. Wiley Online Library, doi:10.1111/0036-0341.711999071.
• "Art and Remembrance: Joseph Brodsky's 'Pamiati ottsa: Avstraliia' ('In Memory of My Father: Australia')." Essays in Poetics, no. 23, 1998, pp. 238-51.
• "Wombs, Tombs, and Mother Love: A Freudian Reading of Goncharov's Oblomov." Goncharov's Oblomov: A Critical Companion, edited by Galya Diment, Northwestern UP, 1998, pp. 90-109. Northwestern/AATSEEL Critical Companions to Russian Literature.
• "Author and Authority: Valentin Rasputin's Downstream, Upstream as a Discourse on Writing." Modern Language Review, vol. 91, no. 2, Apr. 1996, pp. 427-40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3735023.
• "The Anxiety of a Dedication: Joseph Brodsky's 'Kvintet/Sextet' and Mark Strand." Joseph Brodsky. Spec. issue of Russian Literature, vol. 37, no. 2-3, Feb.-Apr. 1995, pp. 203-26. Science Direct, doi:10.1016/0304-3479(95)90636-X.
• "Reflections, Crooked Mirrors, Magic Theaters: Tat'iana Tolstaia's 'Peters.'" Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women’s Culture, edited by Helena Goscilo, M. E. Sharpe, 1993, pp. 251-70.
• "Особенности реализатции экзистенциалистских идей в прозе В.М. Шукшина" ["Existentialist Ideas in the Prose of V. M. Shukshin"]. В. М. Шукшин: философ, историк, художник [V. M. Shukshin: Philosopher, Historian, Artist], edited by S. M. Kozlova, AGU, 1992, pp. 11-36.

Teaching

Courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, Russian film, and all levels of Russian language

Honors and Activities

• University of Rochester Students' Association Government's Professor of the Year in the Humanities, 2017
• University of Rochester Goergen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2011
• University of Rochester Student Association Professor of the Year Award in the Humanities, 2000, 2011
• University of Rochester Edward Peck Curtis Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, 2000
• University of Rochester Student Association Professor of the Year Award, Finalist, 1998, 2002
• Kennan Institute Research Scholarship, Alternate, 1996-1997
• Fulbright-Hays dissertation award; IREX long-term research award, Russia, 1991-1992