Tulane professor, acclaimed Russian expert, commemorates Pushkin’s 227th birthday in Washington, D.C.

On the evening of June 5, guests gathered at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., for a diplomatic event that featured poems, photographs and the voice of a Tulane University professor conjuring the spirit of the man widely regarded as Russia's greatest writer.

William Brumfield, the Sizeler Professor of Jewish Studies in the School of Liberal Arts and one of America's foremost scholars of Russian architectural history, was invited to present his photography and perform readings at a celebration of the 227th birthday of poet, novelist and playwright Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. The beloved writer's groundbreaking work gave the Russian language its modern literary form, and his birthday is commemorated as UN Russian Language Day.

A presentation of Brumfield's photographs brought the event into sharp focus, grounding Pushkin's biography in specific, physical places that Brumfield had visited and documented with his camera over decades of travel.

Russian Ambassador Alexander Darchiev praised Brumfield for having "devoted his entire life to Russian culture, capturing for future generations unique architectural monuments, some of which, alas, no longer exist."

Brumfield's connection to Pushkin's Russia underpins his larger focus of study. He grew up in the American South, a long way from the birch forests and onion-domed churches of northern Russia. Yet, immersed in the great works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and others, he found himself drawn not just to Russian literature but to its landscape, history and built environment.

Brumfield earned his bachelor's degree from Tulane in 1966 and went on to complete his master's degree and PhD in Slavic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970, he arrived in the Soviet Union for the first time as a graduate student, beginning a lifetime of architectural fieldwork and photography that would take him to some of the most remote corners of the Russian north.

Brumfield spent 16 years living and traveling in Russia, photographing vernacular architecture, wooden churches, crumbling manor houses and Soviet-era avant-garde buildings in remote regions.

His photographic archive includes 40,000 negatives, nearly 12,500 black-and-white prints and more than 148,000 digital files, the bulk of which are now held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in the William C. Brumfield Photographs of Russian Architecture collection in Tulane University Libraries.

His books, including "A History of Russian Architecture" (a New York Times Notable Book of 1993), "Lost Russia" and "Architecture at the End of the Earth," have made Russian architectural heritage accessible to English-speaking readers for 40 years. His most recent book, "From Forest to Steppe: The Russian Art of Building in Wood," was published by Duke University Press in 2025.

In 2000, Brumfield was named a Guggenheim Fellow. He has been a full member of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences since 2002 and an honorary fellow of the Russian Academy of the Arts since 2006. In 2014, the D.S. Likhachev Foundation awarded him its prize for outstanding contributions to the preservation of Russia's historic and cultural heritage, and in 2019, he received the Order of Friendship from the Russian government.

"In Russia, they ask me: where did you get such a command of the language, who taught you? Who? Pushkin! Pushkin is my teacher. And I am absolutely serious about this," Brumfield told the embassy audience.

When Brumfield displayed his photograph of the Mikhailovskoye manor house taken in 1988, he said he was showing the place where a young poet wrote the lines that would teach a young American from the South what Russian could sound and feel like.