Nicholas Bujalski Wins 2023 Levin Article Prize
Please join us in congratulating Nicholas Bujalski, winner of the journal’s third annual Levin Article Prize!
His article, “‘Tuk, tuk, tuk!’ A History of Russia’s Prison Knocking Language,” was published in our July 2022 issue, and for members of the selection committee it stood out from a number of worthy candidates because “Bujalski’s analysis allows us to move beyond a totalizing conception of the prison as an institutional space and instead imagine it as contested ground, open for interpretation,” while it also “reminds us that every narrative contains a million reimaginings, if we just put our ears to the wall and listen.” The committee noted that “Bujalski uncovers how, through the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, prisoners communicated with knocks and taps. Against the carceral state’s attempts to isolate and proscribe the prisoners’ lives and thoughts, they tapped out stories, poems, and games to each other. Bujalski elucidates the narrative significance that the tapped language took on in prison memoirs. For imprisoned radicals, it functioned semiotically as a rite of initiation, an incubator for the “revolutionary self-in-becoming.” We invite our followers and all interested folk to enjoy Bujalski's article by going to https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12372
The journal is grateful to Benjamin Musachio, Miles Parker, and Adam Rodger for serving on the prize committee, and especially to Yaroslav Gouzenko for chairing the 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.
Bujalski is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Oberlin College. His book project, “Russia’s Peter and Paul Fortress: From Heart of Empire to Museum of the Revolution, 1825-1930,” is a cultural, intellectual, and spatial history of tsarism’s most notorious political prison and its transformation into a stage of radical selfhood and struggle. Alongside The Russian Review, his scholarship has also appeared in Modern Intellectual History and Marx & Philosophy Review of Books.