Russian poet and journalist Tatiana Shcherbina spent a week at Dickinson in October 2010 as part of the IX annual Semana Poética poetry festival.  

Tatiana graduated from Moscow State University and during the Soviet period five collections of her poetry, as well as a novel, appeared in samizdat.  In 1989 she represented alternative (“second”) literature at the Poetry International of Rotterdam, and in that same year her poems began to see publication in the official Soviet press.  Between 1992 and 1997 Tatiana lived in Paris, where she continued to write poetry and prose, translated poems from French into Russian, and worked for Radio Liberty. Her original work has been widely translated and included in many of the premiere volumes of contemporary Russian poetry. In 1997 she returned to Moscow and in 2001 she became the deputy editor of the journal Vestnik Evropy (European Messenger) in 2001.  

While at Dickinson, Tatiana met with beginning and advanced Russian language students who had been working on translating several of her poems as part of their language study. 

On November 7, 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government in what would come to be known as the October Revolution. On November 5, 2010, Dickinsonians orchestrated their own revolution, reenacting speeches by Lev Trotskii and Vladimir Lenin in Russian and in English translation, and by storming the “Winter Palace” (Old West) in search of the leaders of the Provisional Government. Students of all levels of Russian and from a variety of departments participated in the Russian Department’s annual tradition.