Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Last week, John McCannon, seen left asleep at the podium, traveled to Moscow just long enough to jet-lag himself and take part in an international conference on "Imagined Space: Culture and Geography in Russia," sponsored by the Russian State Institute for the Study of Cultural and Natural Heritage, founded by Dmitrii Likhachev, Gorbachev's cultural and academic adviser during the perestroika years. John spoke (in Russian, mind you) on allegorical conceptions of geography in turn-of-the-century Symbolist painting, then flew back from Russia with exhaustion.