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Tiffany Zhu ’17, now at Stanford, had her Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities paper, written while at Harker, published in the spring 2018 issue of the Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal. The paper is titled “Putting the Realism in Socialist Realism: Gorky’s Mother as a Bridge between Soviet and Chernyshevskian Literary Aesthetics.”
Zhu has continued to pursue her interest in Russia and took a three-week seminar in St. Petersburg. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see much about (Maxim) Gorky (he was mostly based in Moscow, it turns out),” Zhu said, “but we did get to look at Soviet architecture, which we learned had as complicated a relationship with the state as Soviet literature.
“Right now, I’m taking an upper-division colloquium on Russian revolutionaries from the 18th century to the present day, and one of our readings talked about Chernyshevsky’s ‘What is to be Done?’ I feel that my Mitra research prepared me to understand Chernyshevsky and his context when the time came.”
She added a note to her Mitra mentors. “Thank you, so much, once again, for all of your encouragement and support from the very beginning. You all have inspired me to dive deeper into my passions, and I really don’t think I could be the scholar (and Russia enthusiast) I am today without the Mitra program.” Check out her paper – it’s the first one in the magazine.