News
Katherine New Wins 2025 Levin Article Prize
We are delighted to announce that Dr Katherine New of the University of Oxford is the recipient of the 2025 Levin Article Prize.
Katherine New’s “‘Following Our Own Path’: Pavel Katenin’s Political Theater” explores what Katenin considered his best work to elucidate a little-explored and underappreciated aspect of the writer’s creation. New provides both macro- and micro-textual analysis of how Katenin drew from multiple Classical sources as inspiration for his dramas and notably diverged from them in innovative ways, speaking to his deep familiarity with the subject material. The reviewers were particularly impressed by New’s analysis of Katenin’s subversive reworking of traditional characters like Astyanax, Pyrrhus, and Agamemnon, and his foregrounding of historically overlooked heroines like the titular Andromache. Her article demonstrates the resonance of classical mythology and theater in Nicholas I’s Russia and its potential for speaking truth to power. Because Andromache was Katenin’s magnum opus to those (like Pushkin) who penetrated its hoary allusions, New stops short of placing the burden of the play’s failure on its author. While unsuccessful on the nineteenth-century Russian stage, Katenin’s Andromache provides a window into the tradition and praxis of dissent under autocracy—a theme that remains relevant to contemporary audiences.
Katherine New is a Lecturer in Russian at Wadham College at the University of Oxford and a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. She specializes in Russian drama from the Age of Enlightenment to the present day and has published on eighteenth- to twenty-first-century Russian literature, culture, and translation theory. She graduated with a BA (joint honors in Russian and Classics) from University College, Oxford, MSt in Medieval and Modern Languages from University College, Oxford, and completed her DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages (Russian drama, with special consideration of Polish theater) at New College, Oxford. New is currently working on a book project on Russian mythological drama of the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries in the context of Classical literary, philosophical, and visual traditions (archaeological, sculptural, and numismatic).
Named in honor of Eve Levin, who served as the journal's editor from 1996 to 2020, the Levin Article Prize is awarded to the article published in The Russian Review in the previous calendar year judged to be the best by an independent committee of advanced graduate students in Russian and Eurasian studies drawn from institutions across the United States.
The journal is grateful to Alex Azar III, Cooper Lynn, Ekaterina Tutatina, and Keegan Kundman for serving on the prize committee. If you are a scholar interested in being considered for the prize in the future, send us your manuscripts! All articles published in the journal in the previous calendar year will be considered for the award.