In “The Lives of Writers” Eleanor Wachtel will illuminate the relationship between writers, their work and their audience.  She’ll discuss the appetite for literary biography and how greater knowledge of the life of the writer may affect the reader’s appreciation of their work; how writers reveal themselves in their writing; and the self-proclaimed image of the writer as an outsider, on the margins of society.

Eleanor Wachtel earned a reputation as one of the world’s best literary interviewers during her more than 30 years as host of Writers & Company on CBC Radio. Five books of her interviews have been published, including Random Illuminations, a collection of reflections, correspondence and conversations with Carol Shields which won the Independent Publisher Book Award; Original Minds; and most recently, The Best of Writers & Company.  She also co-founded and hosted CBC's Wachtel on the Arts, featuring conversations with filmmakers, composers, architects, artists, etc., as well as the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) popular Books on Film series for more than a decade.  She has received numerous accolades for her contributions to Canadian cultural life: nine honourary degrees and Officer of the Order of Canada.

Under Georgian born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (transliterated from Georgian) or Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (transliterated from the Russian variant), better known to the world as Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union reached the zenith of authoritarianism. This lecture examines how historians have debated the origins of Stalinism and the legacy of Stalinism after his death. Historians variously trace the origins of Stalinist policies to a Tsarist legacy, the violence of the First World War and the civil war that followed it, Communism or Marxism as an ideology, Bolshevik belief, or a combination of factors. The lecture then turns to debates on the nature of “De-Stalinization” under Nikita Khrushchev and the apparent return to authoritarianism after Khrushchev’s death.

Tracy McDonald is an historian of Russian and the Soviet Union at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She is the author of Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule, 1921—1930 (University of Toronto Press, 2011), co-editor with Daniel Vandersommers of Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (McGill-Queens University Press, 2019), and co-editor with Heather DeHaan and Dan Healey of Other Voices in Soviet History: Collected for a Devil’s Advocate (McGill-Queens University Press, 2024). In 2019-2020, she curated an art exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art under the title, “Animals Across Discipline, Time, and Space,” which ran from 4 January until the first Covid lockdown in March. McDonald was one of the three founding members of the independent documentary-film company, Chemodan Films. Between 2004 and 2009 she participated in the making of four films including Province of Lost Film, Uprising, and Photographer.

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