RUSSIAN LITERATURE WEEK – DECEMBER 7–11, 2020
In 2020 RUSSIAN LITERATURE WEEK was held online with a mix of live readings and presentations and documentary films and prerecorded video talks. This year’s theme, given to us by Carol Apollonio, was: READING RUSSIAN LITERATURE DURING HARD TIMES.
The live events on Zoom featured authors and translators in discussion, and prerecorded talks featured contemporary Russian authors surveying the Russian literary scene. Enjoy the recorded live events and author interviews – now all on YouTube!
RUSSIAN LITERATURE WEEK
Monday, December 7, 2020
12:00 PM EST – Antony Wood
“On Reading and Translating Pushkin”
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1CRkq_SWmH4
5:00 PM EST – FILM/VIDEO SCREENING:
“Mayakovsky Forever”
From Russia’s Vladimir Dahl Russian State Literary Museum, based on the exhibition “Twenty Years of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Work,” installed in 1930. Film provided courtesy of the Vladimir Dahl State Literary Museum
In Russian with English subtitles (30 minutes)
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/APqlxlb20Vs
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
12:00 PM EST – Donald Rayfield
“Rehabilitating Leskov”
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/veY8X14-gBc
5:00 PM EST – VIDEO/FILM SCREENING:
Author and literature professor Andrei Astvatsaturov surveys today's literary scene in Russia and speaks to emerging themes and trends among leading writers. Recorded in 2020. Courtesy of Read Russia and the Institute of Translation in Moscow.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6tge8p391sY
Wednesday, December 9, 2020
11:00 AM EST – Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro
“Mikhail Bakhtin, Isaiah Berlin, and the Need for Dialogue”
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BhmiHF4YlKM
12:00 PM EST – Robert Chandler
"Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov 'Among Animals and Plants'"
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bRSmvfqSvAQ
2:00 PM EST – Lisa Hayden and Carol Apollonio
“Reading Russian Literature During Hard Times”
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/T6nKaey_FRM
5:00 PM EST – VIDEO/FILM SCREENING:
Author, editor, critic, and publisher Vadim Levental tells it like it is about the Russian classics. Recorded in 2020. Courtesy of Read Russia and the Institute of Translation in Moscow
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IsXAtT4Mu2c
Thursday, December 10, 2020
12:00 PM EST – READ RUSSIA PRIZE jury members Bryan Karetnyk, Muireann Maguire, and Anastasia Tolstoy discuss the 2020 READ RUSSIA PRIZE
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NR5DnmN5PxA
5:00 PM EST – FILM/VIDEO SCREENING:
Author German Sadulaev on Russian writers (and sex) and writing (bestsellers) in the 1990s and 2000s. Recorded in 2020. Courtesy of Read Russia and the Institute of Translation in Moscow.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QXQhyEKMf8k
Friday, December 11, 2020
12:00 PM – Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, & Maxim Osipov
“Contemporary Literary & Medical Responses to the Pandemic”
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Lm1lGGa1_RE
5:00 PM EST – FILM/VIDEO SCREENING:
Author and translator Andrei Gelasimov - on Russian literature as superweapons and more. Recorded in 2020. Courtesy of Read Russia and the Institute of Translation in Moscow.
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/wTbmFPvrnsw
RUSSIAN LITERATURE WEEK 2020 – SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Carol Apollonio is the author, editor, and translator of books and articles about nineteenth-century Russian literature including Simply Chekhov, Chekhov's Letters, and Dostoevsky's Secrets. Her translations include novels by Alisa Ganieva and German Sadulaev from the Russian, and two books by Kizaki Satoko from the Japanese. She holds a Sesquicentennial Chekhov Medal from the Russian Ministry of Culture and serves as President of the International Dostoevsky Society. In the fall of 2019 she traveled across Siberia in the quest of classic Russian writers, chronicling her adventures in the blog “Chekhov’s Footprints.”
Andrei Astvatsaturov teaches in the history of foreign literature department at Saint Petersburg State University and heads the literature program at Smolny College, an institution founded by SPSU and Bard College. Astvatsaturov’s debut book, People in the Nude, was shortlisted for Russia’s 2010 National Bestseller and NOS awards, and his second book, Skunkamera, was shortlisted for NOS, where it won the reader’s choice prize.
Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian include works by Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov, Ismailov, and Teffi. He has also written a short biography of Pushkin and compiled three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales and, with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, as a poet himself, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Among his most recent translation is Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad (NYRB Classics, 2019).
Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Criterion, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, Jewish Quarterly, First Things, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere.
Alex Fleming is a literary translator from Russian and Swedish. Her translations include works by Maxim Osipov, Katrine Marçal, Camilla Sten and Kayo Mpoyi, and have featured in Asymptote, Litro Magazine, Literary Hub and Image Journal, among others. She is co-editor of Swedish Book Review, a journal of new writing in translation from the Swedish-speaking world.
Andrei Gelasimov broke onto the literary scene in 2002 with his widely-praised story “The Tender Age,” came out in the Russian journal Oktyabr after being published online. His works have since been translated into over a dozen languages, including these in English: Into the Thickening Fog, (Amazon Crossing, 2017, tr. Marian Schwartz), Rachel (Amazon Crossing, 2014, tr. Marian Schwartz); (Amazon Crossing, 2013, tr. Marian Schwartz); The Gods of the Steppe (Amazon Crossing, 2013, tr. Marian Schwartz); and Thirst (Жажда), (Amazon Crossing, 2011, tr. Marian Schwartz). Several Russian feature films and miniseries have been based on his fiction, including one, the 2013 film Thirst, which won multiple prizes and was hailed by critics as one of the best Russian films of the year.
Lisa Hayden’s translations from the Russian include Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, which won the 2016 Read Russia Prize for Contemporary Russian Literature and was shortlisted for the 2016 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, as well as Vodolazkin’s The Aviator and Solovyov and Larionov. She also translated Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Oxford-Weidenfeld award; Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha, a finalist for the 2020 EBRD Literature Prize, Read Russia Prize, and National Translation Award; and Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog. Lisa’s blog, Lizok’s Bookshelf, focuses on contemporary Russian fiction. She is a member of the Literary Academy, the jury for Russia’s Big Book Award.
Bryan Karetnyk is a teaching fellow in Russian literature and culture at University College London. He is the editor and principal translator of the award-winning landmark anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (Penguin Classics, 2017), and his book-length translations include Gaito Gazdanov’s The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, The Flight and An Evening with Claire (Pushkin Press, 2013, 2016 and 2020), Irina Odoevtseva’s Isolde (with Irina Steinberg; Pushkin Press, 2019) and Alexander Grin’s Fandango and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2020). His forthcoming translations include major works by Yuri Felsen and Boris Poplavsky. Karetnyk served as a member of the jury of the 2020 READ RUSSIA PRIZE.
Vadim Levental gained wide recognition in Russia in the 2010s for compiling and editing a four-volume Literary Matrix set of essays by contemporary Russian writers about Russian literary classics. The Matrix books achieved national fame as one of the most successful literary projects of the post-Soviet period. Levental’s first novel, Masha Regina (2012), a portrait of a young woman from a small city who becomes a world-famous film director, was shortlisted for the Big Book prize and translated into English by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld Publications, 2016); and his collection of stories called The Fright Room came out in 2015.
Muireann Maguire is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter, and the author of Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature (Peter Lang, 2012), a study of Gothic-fantastic motifs in early Soviet literature. She is currently working on a second monograph about the depiction of maternity in Russian 19th- and 20th-century fiction, Hideous Agonies: Plotting Pregnancy in Russian Literature. As a freelance translator from Russian, she has translated various literary fictions, including the stories in her edited collection Red Spectres: Russian 20th-Century Gothic-Fantastic Tales (Overlook, 2013). She is the Principal Investigator on a European Research Council-funded Horizon 2020 grant, “RusTrans: The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA.” Maguire also served as a member of the jury of the 2020 READ RUSSIA PRIZE.
Gary Saul Morson Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities; Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures. Saul Morson's work ranges over a variety of areas: literary theory (especially narrative); the history of ideas, both Russian and European; a variety of literary genres (especially satire, utopia, and the novel); and his favorite writers -- Chekhov, Gogol, and, above all, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He is especially interested in the relation of literature to philosophy.
Maxim Osipov is a Russian writer and cardiologist. His short stories and essays have won a number of prizes, and his plays have been staged and broadcast on the radio in Russia. His fiction and non-fiction have been collected in six Russian-language volumes and translated into 18 languages. His debut collection in English, Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stories, translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson, appeared in April 2019 from NYRB Classics. In the early 1990s, he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. Upon returning to Moscow, he continued to practice medicine, co-authored a textbook on clinical cardiology, and founded a publishing house, Practica, which specialized in medical, musical, and theological material. After moving to Tarusa, a town 101 kilometers from Moscow, Osipov began working at the local hospital. He also established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital's survival and to improve its standard of care. He currently lives, writes, and practices medicine in Tarusa.
Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. His translations of selected stories by Nikolai Leskov are available in the collection titled Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk from NYRB Classics, as are his translations of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the Criminal World. He has translated Hamid Ismailov’s novel The Devils’ Dance from the Uzbek and is the author of many articles on Georgian writers and of a history of Georgian literature. In 2012, he published Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, which has recently come out in an expanded Russian-language edition, as have his books Anton Chekhov: A Life and Stalin and His Hangmen.
German Sadulaev was born in Chechnya, which he left in 1989, before the war, to study law in Leningrad. His longer works in English include The Maya Pill (tr. Carol Apollonio, Dalkey Archive Press, 2013) and I Am a Chechen! (tr. Anna Gunin, Harvill Secker, 2010); his shorter work “Why the Sky Doesn’t Fall” is in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House, 2009, story tr. Anna Gunin) and “The Day When You Phone the Dead” in Read Russia! (Read Russia, 2012, story tr. Anna Gunin).
Morton Schapiro began his term as the 16th president of Northwestern University on September 1, 2009. He is a professor of economics in Northwestern’s Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and also holds appointments in the J. L. Kellogg School of Management and the School of Education and Social Policy. President Schapiro is among the nation’s leading authorities on the economics of higher education, with particular expertise in the area of college financing and affordability and on trends in educational costs and student aid. Previously he was president of Williams College from 2000 to 2009. He had served earlier as a member of the Williams College faculty from 1980 to 1991 as professor of economics and assistant provost. In 1991 he went to the University of Southern California, where he served as chair of the Department of Economics until 1994 and then as dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences until 2000. President Schapiro has written more than 100 articles and written or edited ten books, including the upcoming Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us (with Gary Saul Morson, Princeton University Press, 2021); Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (with Gary Saul Morson, Princeton University Press, 2017); The Student Aid Game: Meeting Need and Rewarding Talent in American Higher Education (with Michael McPherson, Princeton University Press, 1998); and Keeping College Affordable: Government and Educational Opportunity (with Michael McPherson, Brookings Institution, 1991).
Anastasia Tolstoy is Junior Research Fellow in European Literature at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She holds a doctorate from Oxford, where she completed her DPhil on Vladimir Nabokov and the Aesthetics of Disgust. Alongside Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd, she recently co-edited and translated a volume of Nabokov’s collected essays, reviews and interviews, Think, Write, Speak (Knopf | Penguin Random House, 2019). She is the co-translator, with Thomas Karshan, of Nabokov’s neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Knopf | Penguin Random House, 2012). Tolstoy also served as a member of the jury of the 2020 READ RUSSIA PRIZE.
Antony Wood learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during National Service. After reading Modern Languages (German and French) and English at Cambridge University he joined Hutchinson publishers as a general apprentice and was then a commissioning editor in London for 25 years before founding his own imprint, Angel Books, devoted to new translations of European literature, especially Russian and German, launched with his own versions of Pushkin’s Little Tragedies (1982). One of these, ‘Mozart and Salieri’, was read on publication on BBC Radio 3 by Paul Scofield and Simon Callow and later performed at various venues. Besides running Angel Books he has pursued a career as a freelance translator. Among his further translations of Pushkin have been ‘The Gypsies’ and other narrative poems (David Godine/Angel Books, 2006), Boris Godunov (contained in The Uncensored Boris Godunov, ed. Chester Dunning et al., University of Wisconsin Press, 2006 and used in a stage production in Princeton, 2007) and Selected Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2020), which won the 2020 READ RUSSIA PRIZE. He enjoys writing light verse; his narrative poem Aphrodite (journal publication 2011) opens: 'Aphrodite/ slipped off her nightie/to frolic in the foam …’).