2019 Literature in Translation Catalog

Academic Studies Press Literature in Translation 2019

On the cover: Kateryna Krychevska-Rosandich, “New York” (1955).

Featured in New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City, edited by Ostap Kin.

CONTENTS 2

The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology Compiled and edited by Mark Andryczyk

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Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works Akram Aylisli | Translated by Katherine E. Young

Night and Day

Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon | Translated by Christopher Fort

Beyond Tula: A Soviet Pastoral

Andrei Egunov-Nikolev| Translated by Ainsley Morse

Russian Cuisine in Exile

Pyotr Vail & Alexander Genis | Translated by Angela Brintlinger & Thomas Feerick

Where There is Danger

Luba Jurgenson | Translated by Meredith Sopher

New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City Edited by Ostap Kin

21: Russian Short Prose from an Odd Century Edited by Mark Lipovetsky

50 Writers: An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories Edited by Valentina Brougher & Mark Lipovetsky | Translated by Valentina Brougher, Mark Lipovetsky, & Frank Miller

Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine

Edited by Oksana Maksymchuk & Max Rosochinsky with an introduction by Ilya Kaminsky and an afterword by Polina Barskova

The Witching Hour and Other Plays

Nina Sadur | Edited by Nadya L. Peterson With an introduction by Mark Lipovetsky and an afterword by Karin Sarsenov

Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature: An Anthology Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer

The Raskin Family: A Novel

Dmitry Stonov | Translated by Konstantin Gurevich & Helen Anderson With a foreword and afterword by Leonid Stonov

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THE WHITE CHALK OF DAYS The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology Compiled and edited by MARK ANDRYCZYK December 2017 | 336 pp.; 15 illus.

9781618118622 | $23.95 | Paperback

The publication of The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology commemorates the tenth year of the Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series. Co-sponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Series has recurrently organized readings in the U.S. for Ukraine’s leading writers since 2008. The anthology presents translations of literary works

by Series guests that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in today’s Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays by fifteen Ukrainian writers, the anthology offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.

Since 2007 Mark Andryczyk has been teaching Ukrainian literature at Columbia University and administering the Ukrainian Studies Program at its Harriman Institute. He is author of the monograph The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012)—Ukrainian edition (Piramida, 2014)—and a translator of Ukrainian literature into English.

“[The White Chalk of Days] feature[s] abundant treatments of the traditional lyrical themes of nature and love, with orchards, birds, moons and rivers galore. But the most memorable poems . . . are those that wrestle with questions of identity, beyond simple patriotism, in the era of globalization, and those that deal with the current war.”

—Sophie Pinkham, The Times Literary Supplement “This book stands as a notable contribution to appreciating major currents in Ukrainian literature of the last generation—an appreciation that, for most of us, is notably overdue.”

—Andrew Singer, World Literature Today “Some of the liveliest and most moving literature in the world is also some of the least known in English. . . . It’s a great public service to enlarge our acquaintance with this indispensable work, an act of moral generosity. But what the reader will be most grateful for is the sheer pleasure of it.”

—Lloyd Schwartz, Poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic

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FAREWELL, AYLIS A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works AKRAM AYLISLI Translated by KATHERINE E. YOUNG November 2018 | 338 pp.

9781644690840 | $21.00 | Paperback

The three novellas of Farewell, Aylis take place over decades of transition in a country that rather resembles modern-day Azerbaijan. In Yemen, a Soviet traveler takes an afternoon stroll and finds himself suspected of defecting to America. In Stone Dreams, an actor explores the limits of one man’s ability to live a moral life amid conditions of sociopolitical upheaval, ethnic cleansing, and petty professional intrigue. In A Fantastical Traffic Jam, those who serve the aging leader of a corrupt, oil-rich country scheme to stay alive. Farewell, Aylis, a new essay by the author that reflects on the political firestorm surrounding these novellas and his current situation as a prisoner of conscience in Azerbaijan, was commissioned especially for this Academic Studies Press edition.

She is the recipient of a 2017 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for the translation of Farewell, Aylis.

“Farewell, Aylis is not a reactive novel intended to prove any ideology right or wrong. Ultimately, it is a work of the heart and a work of love and acceptance for other people, no matter their history.”

—Ryan K. Strader, Cleaver Magazine “Reading Farewell, Aylis is like sitting by the fire at night with the older men of the village and listening to their stories, which in truth are the oral history of a people and a region, which in truth could turn out to be prophecies of our own lives. . . . In [the essay Farewell, Aylis, Aylisli] writes, ‘And I want to serve my motherland not as a patriot but as a writer.’ And that is what he has done with these stories, making him perhaps the true patriot who does what is truly needed for his country and not what pleases and flatters. One, however, needs to read him first and foremost as a writer and be enamored of the allure of his storytelling.”

—Poupeh Missaghi, Asymptote

Akram Aylisli is an Azerbaijani writer, playwright, novelist, and editor. His works have been translated from his native Azeri into more than 20 languages. In 2014 Aylisli was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in connection with his novella Stone Dreams. Mr. Aylisli lives under de facto house arrest in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards and former poet laureate of Arlington, VA. Young has translated two collections of poetry

by Inna Kabysh. Her translations of Russian and Russophone poets have won national and international awards.

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NIGHT AND DAY ABDULHAMID SULAYMON O’G’LI CHO’LPON Translated and introducted by CHRISTOPHER FORT November 2019 | 292 pp.; 2 illus.

9781644690475 | $26.95 | Paperback

Night (1934), the first novel of Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon’s unfinished dilogy of novels, Night and Day, gives readers a glimpse into the everyday struggles of men and women in Russian imperial Turkestan. More than just historical prose, Cho’lpon’s magnum opus reads as poetic elegy and turns on dramatic irony. Though it depicts the terrible fate of a young girl condemned to marry a sexual glutton, nothing is what it seems. Readers find themselves questioning the nature of women’s liberation, colonialism, resistance, and even the intentions of the author, whose life and sequel, Day, were lost to Stalinist terror.

Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon (1897-1938) was the preeminent poet and litterateur of 1920s and 1930s Uzbekistan. His early 1920s associations with so-called “nationalist” circles, his pessimistic poetry, and his criticism of Soviet power made him the target of a barrage of denunciations in the latter half of the decade. After escaping to Moscow during the first round of purges in Central Asia, he returned to Uzbekistan in 1934 and entered the first half of the incomplete dilogy of novels, Night and Day, into a contest for Uzbek socialist prose works. The novel did not win any of the prizes, but the jury recommended for publication, and it was printed in 1936. The following year the book was the subject of yet further denunciations, and Cho’lpon was

arrested. After a relatively acquiescent interrogation—Cho’lpon knew his death was imminent—he was convicted and executed on October 4, 1938.

Christopher Fort holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan and an MA in Russian Area Studies from The Ohio State University. He is also the translator of Uzbek author Isajon Sulton’s The Eternal Wanderer.

“Cho’lpon is truly an innovative modernist writer and poet, who liberated Uzbek literature from centuries -long classical canons. Christopher Fort’s translation of his only novel brings Cho’lpon back to world literature.”

—Hamid Ismailov, author of The Devils’ Dance “Cho’lpon is a foundational figure of modern Uzbek culture and one of the creators of the modern Uzbek language. Night, his major prose work, was banned almost immediately after publication and was out of print for fifty years. Christopher Fort has done us all a tremendous favor by making it available in English. Thanks to his fluent translation, the English-reading public has for the first time direct access to the world of Turkestan under Russian rule. A great achievement.”

—Adeeb Khalid, Carleton College

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Uzbek author Cho’lpon’s Equivocal Legacy and Its Importance in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

By CHRISTOPHER FORT In early September, states across Eastern Europe and Eurasia commemorated some of the foundational dates for their post-Soviet societies. In late August, the European Union observed its 10th annual Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. On September 1, Uzbekistan, the most populous country of post-Soviet Central Asia, celebrated its Independence Day and honored those executed in Stalin’s purges. For contemporary Uzbeks, the anti-imperialist nationalist intellectuals murdered from 1936 to 1938 are now a critical part of the national mythology. The vision of the Uzbek nation for which they lost their lives, Uzbek schools teach, has been realized by contemporary Uzbekistan. Arguably the most prominent member of that generation of Uzbek intellectuals was the poet, novelist, and dramatist Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, whose 1934 novel, Night and Day, Academic Studies Press will shortly publish in my translation.

Stalinism undoubtedly robbed the Uzbek people and the world of an incredible talent at a young age—Cho’lpon was most likely 41 when Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, took his life—but it is because of Stalinism and Cho’lpon’s erasure from Soviet Uzbek life that the author is so interesting and enigmatic a figure today. The absence of information about his life and his oeuvre echoes across history and continues to affect how Uzbek audiences relate to the author. This absence provides opportunities for individuals to offer differentiated and heterogenous interpretations of the author’s biography, his art, and consequently, Uzbekistan’s past, present, and future.

Both Stalin and Soviet Uzbeks after Stalin’s death created and sustained this absence. After his death in 1938, Cho’lpon was not permitted to return to print or even be mentioned publicly for the duration of Stalin’s life. He was rehabilitated in 1956 with the beginning of Khrushchev’s Thaw, but he nevertheless remained a taboo figure for Soviet Uzbeks. His works were not reprinted during Khrushchev’s time in power. As the Thaw ended, Uzbek intellectuals in 1968 attempted to include a few of Cho’lpon’s poems in an anthology of Uzbek poetry, but the local Communist Party leadership quickly stopped publication. Rumors subsequently flooded the capital of Tashkent that the editor of the anthology killed himself to avoid repression. While that was untrue—the editor merely received a reprimand and remained very much alive—those rumors speak to Cho’lpon’s impermissibility throughout the Soviet period.

Because of this expurgation of Cho’lpon from Soviet public discourse, there are major disagreements about the most basic details of his biography.

We have no information as to his date of birth, and sources disagree as to the year in which he was born. Most suggest 1897, but others have offered 1894 and 1898 as possible years. This scholarly disagreement developed into a nationwide dispute when Cho’lpon’s hometown of Andijon decided to hold the 120-year jubilee of his birth in 2017, while the Uzbekistan Writers’ Union, adhering to other sources, held off until 2018.

Similarly, thanks to Stalinism’s erasure of history, the country’s academics have never produced a complete collection of writings for Cho’lpon. That has led to fascinating discrepancies in how the poet has been interpreted.

The Soviet Union poured vast resources into such endeavors for Uzbek

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socialist writers who, though they would never admit it, were influenced by Cho’lpon’s advances in Uzbek-language poetics. The socialist empire, of course, never brought itself to do the same for Cho’lpon, despite his importance to the canon. Contemporary Uzbekistan no longer invests in philology like its Soviet predecessor, and thus any scholar of Cho’lpon has to consult various collections and original 1920s and 1930s-era sources, many of which are incomplete, missing pages, or have names and words crossed out. Those absences naturally lead to interpretive disagreements. One of Cho’lpon’s more famous poems, a poem which serves as the epigraph for Uzbek author Hamid Ismailov’s recently translated The Devil’s Dance, appears with differing punctuation across various editions of Cho’lpon’s work.

That difference in punctuation dramatically changes how one interprets the short poem. In one variant, we read the lyric persona as speaking, while in the other, we read the devil as speaking.

Most intriguingly, to this day we possess only the first half of Night and Day. Cho’lpon dubbed the novel I have translated as Night, and reportedly intended a sequel, Day. The absence of this sequel has given Uzbek scholars and the public considerable opportunity to speculate about Cho’lpon’s intentions. Some scholars have contended that Cho’lpon wrote everything he intended in Night and only spoke of a sequel in order to please Soviet observers. Others suggest that he, in fact, wrote a sequel, but the NKVD confiscated and destroyed it when they arrested him. Rumors in recent years have spoken of the possibility that the sequel somehow escaped the country and is somewhere hidden in Xinjiang. In my introduction to the translation, I pursue a new argument. I maintain that the absence of the second novel serendipitously conforms to Cho’lpon’s aesthetic intent. Throughout his mature poetic life, he pursued an aesthetic of inconclusiveness whereby his characters experience endless epiphanies and never arrive at finality. Like his characters’ development, his dilogy lacks a conclusion.

These inevitably heterogenous interpretations of Cho’lpon ultimately have meaning for Uzbekistan’s present and future. The current Uzbekistani state emphasizes Cho’lpon as a martyr now redeemed by the freedom of the post-Soviet present. Much like the Soviet state, Uzbekistan endeavors to create a single interpretation of Cho’lpon’s legacy, sponsoring jubilees and teaching his works in school. The state tells and retells his story in order to affirm itself and justify its existence. And yet, the current state cannot fully control how its citizens interpret Cho’lpon. Uzbeks may see him as affirming the current state, but they might also use interpretations of the author to critique the state’s policies as anti-democratic or anti-national. Because of the absences in Uzbekistan’s literary and historical record, Cho’lpon’s legacy will never be fully decided and always remain a matter of interpretation.

With my forthcoming translation, I bring this fascinating and mysterious artist to English-language audiences. Acquainted with the text and with the informational absences that characterize Uzbek 20th-century literature and history, English-language readers can join Uzbeks in their debates over Cho’lpon and Uzbekistan’s absence-riddled past. In so doing, they can participate in the discussion of what that past means for the country and region’s future.

This essay by Christopher Fort was originally published on August 29, 2019, on our blog, www.academicstudiespress.com/asp-blog.

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BEYOND TULA A Soviet Pastoral ANDREI EGUNOV-NIKOLEV Translated by AINSLEY MORSE May 2019 | 196 pp.

9781618119735 | $22.95 | Paperback

Andrei Egunov-Nikolev’s Beyond Tula is an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy world of early Soviet “production” prose, with its celebration of robust workers heroically building socialism. Combining burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical and Russian High Modernist literature with a rather tongue-in-cheek plot about the struggles of an industrializing rural proletariat, this “Soviet pastoral” actually appeared in the official press in 1931 (though it was quickly removed from circulation). As a renegade classics scholar, Egunov was aware of the expressive potential latent in so-called “light genres”—Beyond Tula is a modernist pastoral jaunt that leaves the reader with plenty to ponder.

“The best way to think of [Beyond Tula] is as a kind of layer cake, a book that tries to be an Ancient Greek romance, a Soviet-era production novel, a summer idyll, a parody of various 19th-century Russian tropes and ideas, a sour analysis of human nature, and a homoerotic buddy story, all at the same time. It skips from satire to parody to music-hall comedy (the characters are constantly singing snatches of popular romances) in a way that is dizzying to read and must have been a riot to translate. (Ainsley Morse’s translation is impeccable: enjoyable, coherent, inventive, and at times very funny.) . . . Beyond Tula is a fine addition to the subgenre of Lucianian satires about nothing much, about mooching and musing, alongside Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist or Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet. We are lucky to have it in a forthright and laugh-out-loud funny English translation that pops and bubbles.”

—James Womack, Los Angeles Review of Books

Ainsley Morse is a teacher, translator, and scholar of Slavic languages and literatures, primarily Russian. She currently teaches at Pomona College.

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RUSSIAN CUISINE IN EXILE PYOTR VAIL & ALEXANDER GENIS Translated by ANGELA BRINTLINGER & THOMAS FEERICK November 2018 | 114 pp.; 70 color illus.

9781618117304 | $24.95 | Paperback

Russian Cuisine in Exile brings the essays of Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis, originally written in the mid-1980s, to an English-speaking audience. A must-read for scholars, students and general readers interested in Russian studies, but also for specialists in émigré literature, mobility studies, popular culture, and food studies. These essays—beloved by Russians in the U.S., the Russian diaspora across the world, and in postSoviet Russia—narrate everyday experiences and re-imagine the identities of immigrants through their engagement with Russian cuisine.

Richly illustrated and beautifully produced, the book has been translated “not word for word, but smile for smile,” to use the phrase of Vail and Genis’s fellow émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov.

Translators Angela Brintlinger and Thomas Feerick have supplied copious authoritative and occasionally amusing commentaries.

Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis were, as they noted, “geopolitically” Russian.

Born citizens of the USSR—Vail in Riga, Latvia in 1949 and Genis in Ryazan, Russia in 1953—they emigrated in 1977 to New York, where they became writers, journalists, and radio broadcasters. Among their endeavors was a short-lived Russian-language newspaper for Soviet émigrés called The New American, which they launced with fellow émigré author Sergei

Dovlatov. They also both worked for Radio Liberty, eventually hosting their own programs (“Heroes of Our Time” and “American Hour with Alexander Genis”). In 1995 Vail moved to Prague, where he headed the Russia desk and served as managing editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty until his death in 2009, while Genis remained in New York, where he lives to this day.

Their writing partnership yielded two important books which make a significant contribution to the field of “everyday life studies,” taking the reader back in time to participate in the 1960s Soviet experience (The 60s. The World of Soviet People) or 1980s émigré life (Russian Cuisine in Exile). Erudite and ethical, clever and kind, these two writers offer a view into the lives of displaced people. Their language and culture tied them to the vast empire which had ejected them, and their thoughtful and often entertaining engagement with politics and literature continues to attract readers across the globe today.

Angela Brintlinger is fascinated with Russian language and culture. She has written, edited and translated numerous books and articles about Russian literature and has taught several generations of students at Ohio State University, including co-translator Thomas Feerick, who is currently pursuing his PhD at Northwestern University.

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“Mouth-watering, erudite, nostalgic, mordantly funny, Russian Cuisine in Exile has been a beloved cult classic for generations of hungry Russians both at home and abroad. Now this tour de force of literary food writing is finally available in a terrific English translation, replete with a smart, eyecatching design, whimsical illustrations, and helpful commentaries. A feast for the senses!”

—Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

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WHERE THERE IS DANGER LUBA JURGENSON Translated by MEREDITH SOPHER November 2019 | 104 pp.

9781644690390 | $21.95 | Paperback Winner of the 2015 Prix Valery Larbaud

Writer, professor, translator and editor Luba Jurgenson lives between two languages—her native Russian and her adopted French. She recounts the coexistence of these two languages, as well as two bodies and two worlds, in an autobiographical text packed with fascinating anecdotes. Living bilingually can be uncomfortable, but this strange in-between state can equally serve as a refuge and inspire creativity.

Jurgenson sheds light on this littleexplored territory with lively prose and a keen awareness of her historical and literary context. Language, identity, translation, and the self: all are intertwined. The ceaseless journey of bilingualism is at last revealed.

Luba Jurgenson is Professor of Russian Literature and specializes in representations of mass violence in East and Central Europe. She also serves as Director of the research centre Eur’ORBEM at the Sorbonne and as an editorial board member for the journal Memories at Stake.

Meredith Sopher studied FrenchEnglish Translation and Interpretation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

She currently works as a freelance translator and interpreter in France.

“In the first essay of her collection Where There Is Danger, Luba Jurgenson writes, ‘Bilingualism is waiting for its chronicler, someone down-to-earth who follows each step of the bodily clues to the constantly shifting center.’ As such a chronicler, she makes striking metaphors of history, language, the body, and the diaspora, hoping to understand the strange reality of being a citizen of two languages and their cultures. . . .

Jurgenson’s voice sounds cohesive and aware, and she interrogates language to examine the origins of thought and purpose. French and Russian have history embedded within their words, should someone care to parse it.

In such acts of dissection and revivification, Where There Is Danger is at its brightest.”

—Camille-Yvette Welsch, Foreword Reviews

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An Interview with Luba Jurgenson and Meredith Sopher, Author and Translator of Where There Is Danger Luba—how involved were you in the process of translating Where There Is Danger?

Luba Jurgenson: Working together with Meredith, I could not claim to know better than she did how to write. I could not pretend knowing better than Meredith while working with her.

I trusted my intuition, and I felt that her sentences sounded right, that she had grasped the tone of the book. However, I was vastly involved in the details, because the details are of great importance in this book. In French, I had looked for the right word for each image, and I wanted it to be the same in English, so that we wouldn't succumb to the easy option, the cliché. I wanted the same level of requirement in English as in French, and Meredith lived up to the challenge. When you write, you don’t consider the complexity of your text. My text seemed simple to me. It deals with the ordinary life, the body, the sensations linked to the language. It was by putting myself in Meredith’s shoes that I realized how difficult this translation could be! The fact that the book is a reflection going back and forth between French and Russian only added complexity to its translation into English.

But I was convinced that this book did not only concern Franco-Russian bilinguals, or even bilinguals in general, that it concerns everyone, and that is why I am also very pleased to see it translated.

Considering the book’s focus on language and bilingualism, and the fact that you are a translator yourself, how did it feel to see the book in English?

LJ: Seeing my text being translated into English was like observing its extension, a new life of the book. A written book always escapes us: we don’t know how it will be read, what the reader will remember. Perhaps the reader will understand something quite different than what we meant. This is proof that the book is alive.

Translation is part of these later lives of the book and of course, these lives are extended differently according to the languages. It has another “acoustic body.”

The speech organs do not work in the same way in French and English. And these different sounds undoubtedly activate different zones of imagination, different sound memories, different connections.

It is always a pleasure to see your book translated, but when it comes to a book about language, it is increasingly exciting! Especially in English, a language I love, even if I have a passive knowledge of it through reading.

Meredith—what were some of the challenges of translating this particular work? Did you seek advice from Luba or anyone else in the process?

Meredith Sopher: I’m glad that Luba was willing and able to provide support during the translation process. I often had questions about specific references to Soviet/Russian authors and works of literature. I went down many, many Internet rabbit holes while researching songs, poems, names and historical events. Luba’s book exists within a rich literary and historical context and certain ideas that would be familiar from a Western European/Francophone point of view were challenging to communicate to an American/Anglophone reader.

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You work as both a translator and an interpreter, different forms of a similar concept. Does your experience as an interpreter inform or influence your work as a translator, or vice versa?

MS: For me personally, I find that when I spend a lot of time interpreting, I loosen up and get more creative in all of my work. Interpreting is a game in which you exchange meaning for meaning, not words for words. Translation is not a wordfor-word exchange either, but the translator is more closely bound to the source.

While I was working on Where There Is Danger, Luba also requested that I stick fairly closely to the source text and even the source punctuation. If I were to translate the book now, after having spent some time focusing on interpretation, I think the result would be quite different!

Luba—in Where There Is Danger, you write about the challenges and rewards of thinking bilingually, and the way geographical place and physical spaces inform and are informed by language. For instance, in Moscow, to reach a destination one must “walk between two apartment blocks or under an archway to get to the courtyard,” whereas in Paris, “The buildings are sandwiched together tightly enough to protect you from the idea that a world beyond could snatch you up at any moment.” Is there a similar sense of confusion or claustrophobia when moving between languages?

LJ: Each language has its own representation of space. Navigating between languages requires an effort of orientation. We live in the language as we live in a city, with its own routes. In Russia everything is big, in France everything is compact, tightened. No doubt, if I had written in Russian, I would not have worked on the language in the same way. French always encouraged me to seek conciseness, to work the word inwards, to condense my sentences. Cities are metaphors for describing the relationship to language. At the same time, they are very real cities, with their particular connection between the center and the margins, between the visible and the invisible, between the past and the present, between the real and the imaginary. This relationship in its turn involves the language, the verbal system, the adverbs of time and place, etc.

When you are bilingual, you project yourself into these different spaces, you also question them. They are not given at once, they move, they must continuously be constructed. You can feel lost in the universe of words, but you can also feel each language as a habitable planet, a welcoming place.

You can feel claustrophobic when you translate, you feel terribly cramped when it comes to transposing a natural expression into a language in which it doesn't exist.

It implies creating a room for it. We push the walls of the tongue, we create nooks and crannies.

Meredith—in Where There Is Danger, Luba wrote (and you translated) that “To be human is to translate.” How do you interpret this?

MS: How would I interpret this, indeed? I would say that as living creatures, we are constantly translating the sensory output we receive from the world into something that we can understand. And then, we have to figure out how to translate our thoughts and feelings into a language that others will understand. We are constantly telling ourselves stories to make sense of something that we have experienced, or struggling to describe to someone else a situation that the other person did not witness. As humans, we seem to have a deep need to make ourselves understandable and to understand. This process could be called translation.

This interview was originally published on September 20, 2019, on our blog, www.academicstudiespress.com/asp-blog.

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NEW YORK ELEGIES Ukrainian Poems on the City Edited by OSTAP KIN February 2019 | 330 pp.; 12 color illus.

9781618118912 | $23.95 | Paperback

New York Elegies attempts to demonstrate how descriptions and evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout its development. The collection thus gives readers the opportunity to view New York through various poetic and stylistic lenses. Ukrainian poets connected themselves to a powerful myth of New York, the myth of urban modernity and problematic vitality. The city of exiles and outsiders sees itself reflected in the mirror that newcomers and exiles created. By adding new voices and layers to this amalgam, it is possible to observe the expanded picture of this worldly poetic city.

“Ukrainians are coming! Ukrainians are coming! Actually they have been here all along. What good luck to have this comprehensive, all-embracing anthology, ranging from 20th century classics of Ukrainian poetry to our own contemporaries.

The incredible gift of this book is the chance to see ourselves through the eyes of poets of a different tradition.

We have often been changed by observing how artists from other traditions see us. Here, too, one thinks of Lorka’s Poet in New York as one reads: ‘like blood / coming / out of vein / the car / tumbles along / the concrete.’

Here is the New York City we know nothing about—and yet it tells us so much about ourselves in ‘the canyons of the city,’ where ‘the brownstones / breathe fish and garlic / on each other.’

As a reader, I am especially grateful to Ostap Kin for his superior introduction and excellent selections of poems herein. It is the book that offers us many discoveries.”

—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

Ostap Kin is an archivist and literary researcher. He co-translated The Maidan After Hours (2017), a chapbook

by Vasyl Lozynsky and Songs for a Dead Rooster (forthcoming with Lost Horse Press), a collection of poems by Yuri Andrukhovych.

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21 Russian Short Prose from an Odd Century Edited by MARK LIPOVETSKY September 2019 | 334 pp.

9781644690550 | $26.95 | Paperback

This collection of Russian short stories from the 21st century includes works by famous writers and young talents alike, representing a diversity of generational, gender, ethnic and national identities. Their authors live not only in Russia, but also in Europe and the U.S. Short stories in this volume display a vast spectrum of subgenres, from grotesque absurdist stories to lyrical essays, from realistic narratives to fantastic parables. Taken together, they display rich and complex cultural and intellectual reality of contemporary Russia, in which political, social, and ethnic conflicts of today coexist with themes and characters resonating with classical literature, albeit invariably twisted and transformed in an unpredictable way.

Most of texts in this volume appear in English for the first time. 21 may be useful for college courses but will also provide exciting reading for anyone interested in contemporary Russia.

Mark Lipovetsky is Professor of Russian at Columbia University. He is the author of ten monographs and more than a hundred articles.

“21: Russian Short Prose from an Odd Century gathers together marvelous examples of the diversity and richness of Russian writing in the contemporary moment. Its authors are drawn from distinct generations, live in countries scattered across the globe, and work in a broad range of styles and genres, from more traditional stories to sketches, essays, fairy tales, and ‘the uncategorizable.’ Its editor and crack team of translators have produced excellent, polished English versions. In short, for the general readership, as well as for college and school courses, this book provides a brilliant overview of Russian literature today.”

—Kevin M.F. Platt, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania “Cleverly selected and impeccably translated, 21 introduces its readers to some of the best Russian writers of our time.”

— Eliot Borenstein, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, Collegiate Professor, New York University

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50 WRITERS An Anthology of 20th Century Russian Short Stories Translated by VALENTINA BROUGHER, MARK LIPOVETSKY, & FRANK MILLER March 2011 | 792 pp.

9781936235223 | $49.00 | Paperback

The largest, most comprehensive anthology of its kind, this volume brings together significant, representative stories from every decade of the twentieth century. It includes the prose of officially recognized writers and dissidents, both well-known and neglected or forgotten, plus new authors from the end of the century.

The selections reflect the various literary trends and approaches to depicting reality in this era: traditional realism, modernism, socialist realism, and post-modernism. Taken as a whole, the stories capture every major aspect of Russian life, history and culture in the twentieth century. The rich array of themes and styles will be of tremendous interest to students and readers who want to learn about Russia through the engaging genre of the short story.

Valentina Brougher (PhD University of Kansas) is Professor Emerita, Department of Slavic Languages, Georgetown University. Her articles on 20th century Russian writers have been published in major academic journals, and her translations of 20th century prose have appeared in anthologies and special editions.

Mark Lipovetsky is Professor of Russian at Columbia University. He is the author of ten monographs and more than a hundred articles.

Frank Miller (PhD 1976, Indiana University) was a professor at Columbia University.

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“This selection of mainly newly translated stories from the 20th century includes both well-known writers and new voices. It eschews traditional selections from the former category and presents startling writings from the latter. As the editorstranslators put it themselves in their lucid introduction, these stories together form a ‘mega-novel’ about Russia of the previous century from its first revolution to post-perestroika times.”

—Irene Masing-Delic, Ohio State University “If you like the short-story genre, don’t pick up this addictive collection unless you are prepared to be lost in its riches for a considerable time. These beautifully translated, haunting Russian tales written from 1901 to 2001, almost all previously unpublished, read so smoothly that they are seductive. And, as the editors suggest, if the stories are read as they are arranged, chronologically, the continuity of certain themes makes the whole lot into ‘a kind of amazing mega-novel, with different heroes, historical periods and situations which nevertheless resonate with one another and become intertwined. . . .’”

—Priscilla S. Taylor, Washington Times

WORDS FOR WAR New Poems from Ukraine Edited by OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK & MAX ROSOCHINSKY with an introduction by ILYA KAMINSKY and an afterword by POLINA BARSKOVA December 2017 | 242 pp.; 16 color illus.

9781618118615 | $23.95 | Paperback

The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war.

Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility.

The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.

Oksana Maksymchuk is an author of two award-winning books of poetry in the Ukrainian language, and a recipient of Richmond Lattimore and Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation prizes. She works on problems of cognition and motivation in Plato’s moral psychology. Maksymchuk teaches philosophy at the University of Arkansas.

Max Rosochinsky is a poet and translator from Simferopol, Crimea. His poems had been nominated for the PEN International New Voices Award in 2015. With Maksymchuk, he won first

place in the 2014 Brodsky-Spender competition. His academic work focuses on twentieth century Russian poetry, especially Osip Mandelshtam and Marina Tsvetaeva.

“The kind of poetry included . . . is the antithesis of propaganda; these poetic dialogues are a valuable reminder that there is nothing immutable about Russian–Ukrainian enmity.”

—Sophie Pinkham, The Times Literary Supplement “Poets standing on a small patch of ground between life and death; this is one of the most important anthologies of our time! Many thanks to the poets, editors and translators, bringing urgency to the forefront! These are poets who remind us we are of one world and we need to meet them there!”

—CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death “Words for War is not your conventional poetry of witness but poetry and collective translation as intervention, complicity, weapon, social media fodder, reflection, deflection, defection, defiance, sentiment, mourning, melancholy, anger, black comedy, patriotism, disgust, activism, iPad wet dream, delirium, nightmare, hope, hopelessness, absurdity, combat. Poetry in the service of poetry. Poetry on the front lines.”

—Charles Bernstein, co-editor, Best American Experimental Poetry (2017)

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THE WITCHING HOUR AND OTHER PLAYS NINA SADUR Edited by NADYA L. PETERSON with an introduction by MARK LIPOVETSKY and an afterword by KARIN SARSENOV August 2014 | 204 pp.

9781618113993 | $19.00 | Paperback

Nina Sadur, the playwright, occupies a prominent place in the Soviet/Russian drama pantheon of the 1980s and 1990s, a group that has with few exceptions been generally ignored by the Western literary establishment. The plays included in this volume offer some of Sadur’s most influential works for the theater to the English-speaking audience for the first time. The collection will appeal to readers interested in Russian literature and culture, Russian theater, as well as women’s literature. Sadur’s plays are inspired by symbolist drama, the theater of the absurd and Russian folklore, yet are also infused with contemporary reality and populated by contemporary characters. Her work is overtly gynocentric: the fictional world construes women’s traditionally downplayed concerns as narratively and existentially central and crucial.

Sadur’s drama has exerted a tremendous influence on contemporary Russian literature. Working essentially in isolation, Sadur was able to combine the early twentieth century dramatic discourse with that of the late Soviet era. Having built a bridge between the two eras, Sadur prepared the rise of the new Russian drama of the 2000s.

Born in Riga, Latvia, Nadya L. Peterson was educated in Moscow, Russia and received her PhD in Russian literature from Indiana University. She is currently an associate professor of

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Russian at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the head of the Russian and Slavic Studies Program at Hunter. Dr. Peterson is also on the faculty of the doctoral program in the department of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a specialist on contemporary Russian prose and women’s literature. She is the author of Subversive Imaginations: Fantastic Prose and the End of Soviet Literature, 1970s–1990s and of a number of articles on various aspects of Russian literature, culture and education. She is a published translator and editor, most recently of Russian Love Stories (Peter Lang, 2009).

“Sadur’s plays are discomforting; they uproot certainties, allowing deep and ugly forces to disrupt the strained surface of Soviet life. . . . The translations in this new collection of Sadur’s plays were collaborative efforts; together with the introduction, they will allow practitioners to understand the work of an important late Soviet playwright.”

—Sasha Dugdale, The Times Literary Supplement

VOICES OF JEWISHRUSSIAN LITERATURE An Anthology Edited by MAXIM D. SHRAYER November 2018 | 1036 pp.

9781618117922 | $49.95 | Paperback

Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, a leading specialist in Russia’s Jewish culture, this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people’s history. A living record of the rich and vibrant legacy of Russia’s Jews, this readerfriendly and comprehensive anthology features original English translations. In its selection and presentation, the anthology tilts in favor of human interest and readability. It is organized both chronologically and topically. A comprehensive headnote introduces each section. Individual selections have short essays containing information about the authors and the works that are relevant to the topic. Over 500,000 Russian-speaking Jews presently live in America and about 1 million in Israel, while only about 170,000 Jews remain in Russia. The great outflux of Jews from the former USSR and the postSoviet states has changed the cultural habitat of world Jewry. A formidable force and a new Jewish Diaspora, Russian Jews are transforming the texture of daily life in the U.S. and Canada, and Israel. A living memory, a space of survival and a record of success, Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature ensures the preservation and accessibility of the rich legacy of Russian-speaking Jews.

Maxim D. Shrayer, a bilingual author, scholar and translator, is Professor of

Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College and Director of the Project on Russian & Eurasian Jewry at Harvard’s Davis Center. Born in Moscow in 1967 to a writer’s family, Shrayer emigrated to the United States in 1987.

He has authored and edited fifteen books in English and Russian, among them the internationally acclaimed memoirs Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story and Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, the story collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, and the Holocaust study I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah, and the travelogue With or Without You: The Prospect for Jews in Today’s Russia. Shrayer is the recipient of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Visit Shrayer’s website at www.shrayer.com.

“This is an enlightening, well-edited anthology, a partial answer to an eternally vexed question: what does it mean to be a writer with talent and Jewish blood in Russia? . . . The attitudes of these writers of two centuries are varied and complex, but their experiences of anti-Semitism are the same. A valuable contribution to the study of Russian literature.”

—Ellendea Proffer Teasley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of Ardis Publishers

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THE RASKIN FAMILY A Novel DMITRY STONOV Translated by KONSTANTIN GUREVICH & HELEN ANDERSON with a foreword and afterword by LEONID STONOV October 2019 | 224 pp.; 7 illus., 2 maps 9781644690581 | $22.95 | Paperback

Meyer Raskin is a wealthy Jewish entrepreneur running a large agricultural estate in Belarus on the western outskirts of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. His wife Chava feels out of place and yearns for the quiet life of a Jewish shtetl.

Together they have six children, some of whom help their father on the estate, while others are more interested in pursuing education or getting involved in revolutionary politics. Their lives are interrupted first by the Russian revolution of 1905 and later by World War I, which eventually turns them all into refugees. This is an autobiographical novel based on the author’s family.

Dmitry Stonov (1898-1962) was a Soviet literary author and a war correspondent in World War II. Because of his ties to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, he spent over five years in the Gulag (1949-1954). He published a dozen books and many short stories, some autobiographical.

“The Raskin Family is a vivid, compelling portrait of Jewish life in the twilight of the Russian Empire.

Dmitry Stonov fashions his semiautobiographical novel with deep feeling but without either sentimentality or nostalgia for what was lost. His characters, like his many family members, struggle to make a life for themselves in the face of unrelenting pressures and prejudice until social and political change, accelerated by war and revolution, engulf their traditional lives in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. First published in Moscow in 1929, and then republished under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, The Raskin Family is a stunning achievement.”

—Joshua Rubenstein, author of The Last Days of Stalin “Aside from his excellent prose, Stonov’s book contains precious details about an era whose features are barely discernible today. The Raskin Family paints a picture of the fate of an entire generation standing at the historic threshold that began with great hopes and ended with those hopes crushed. This autobiographical novel has outlived its author and will no doubt remain not only on library shelves but also in the grateful memory of the upcoming generations.”

— David Markish, author of To Become Lutov

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