Elise Thorsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a BA in Russian Studies from the College of William and Mary, and an MA in Russian Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. This spring, she is defending her dissertation, “Territory and Empire in Early Soviet Poetry,” which deals with the early Soviet avant-garde and their successors under Socialist Realism and their various strategies in constructing imagined communities for the Soviet Union.