September 5, 2023

Q&A: Susanne Fusso on To the Stars and Other Stories

Though you may not recognize his name, Fyodor Sologub was a renowned Russian Symbolist writer and poet credited with bringing morbid realism into eastern European literature. To the Stars and Other Stories showcases Sologub’s iconic writing through short stories, presenting...

September 23, 2021

A Unicorn in Moscow’s Boulevards

By Jonathan Stone

I’ve never spotted a centaur in Moscow. So far. And it hasn’t been for want of trying. Every time I walk around the serene lake at the Novodevichy Monastery (the same enchanted spot that inspired Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake), I scan...

September 21, 2021

Yury Tynyanov’s The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar: A Deathless Novel

By Anna Kurkina Rush

The short life of Yury Tynyanov (1896-1943) spanned some of the most traumatic upheavals of the twentieth century: world wars, revolutions, the Russian Civil War, the dark years of military communism, the waves of Stalinist purges, and the Great Terror....

September 26, 2019

Sarah Vitali on Necropolis

“Khodasevich’s crystalline, mordant prose is skilfully handled by Sarah Vitali, who has done justice to the text and supplemented it with a wealth of endnotes that illuminate its more allusive and evasive moments. The edition also benefits from a stylish...

September 21, 2019

Susanne Fusso on Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage and Yuz Aleshkovsky’s Contribution to Russian Literature

“Joseph Brodsky once noted that Aleshkovsky had a Mozartian ear for the Russian language, and Nikolai Nikolaevich (1970), his first novel, as well as Camouflage (1978), his fourth – written the year before the author emigrated permanently to the US – are indeed virtuoso...

August 30, 2019

Weekend Reading List: Russian Literature in Translation

Women In Translation Month is winding down to a close, but you can still expand your literary horizons to include more works of Russian Literature authored by women. Our list below is split into two parts, first up is contemporary works of...

August 29, 2019

Book Excerpts! KLOTSVOG and THE MAN WHO COULDN’T DIE

 “Since its launch, the series has already enhanced the scope of Russian literary texts available in English, and it promises significantly more to come, with planned titles ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, by both new and established translators.” ~Katherine Bowers, Translation and...

August 27, 2019

Why A Novel About Post-War Trauma—Filled With Difficult Personalities—Makes a Great Beach Read

“Klotsvog is a story of everyday darkness told by the ultimate unreliable narrator… As Maya vibrates on a frequency between ruthless self-determination and charming narcissism, Klotsvog infects its audience with a compulsion to determine which dominates.” ~Foreword Reviews August is...

August 9, 2019

Book Excerpt! A Double Life

“Published in the revolutionary year of 1848, A Double Life traces the awakening of a young noblewoman who by day submits to the prose of high society matchmaking, while at night she is a poet in her dreams of true...

August 7, 2019

Barbara Heldt on How Translation Can Give a Book a Second Life

“Karolina Pavlova’s 1848 novel made a splash when it first appeared, and for good reason. It is interesting in form, mixing prose and poetry, and full of sharply ironic insights about Russian society of the day, especially the lives of...

May 24, 2019

Resurrecting a Great Golden Age Poet

It’s the final day of Russian Literature Week. We’ve celebrated all week by sharing events and excerpts from our Russian Library series. Today’s we are sharing an excerpt from a compilation of Konstantin Batyushklov’s work. The final Russian Literature Week...

May 23, 2019

Translating the Untranslatable

Our second #TranslationThursday post brings you an excerpt from Between Dog and Wolf, a novel by Sahsa Sokolov. In honor of of Russian Literature Week, we have shared an excerpts from titles published in our Russian Library series. Russian Literature...