This presentation celebrates the people and the processes behind the launch of Penguin’s Russian Classics in the mid-twentieth century, fifty years after Constance Garnett’s monopoly. By combining publishing innovation with translations written in good, modern English (by translators such as Gilbert Gardiner, David Magarshack, Elisaveta Fen, Rosemary Edmonds), Penguin brought classic Russian literature into the twentieth-century to suit a self-improving, inquisitive, post-war British reader. Dr Cathy McAteer will draw on her doctoral research of the Penguin archive to reveal some of the publishing and translation practices behind Penguin’s makeover of Russian Classics. She will explore the ways in which Penguin, the series editor E.V. Rieu, and his commissioned translators catered to this target readership, how they generated a new Anglophone appreciation for great Russian authors, and subsequently paved the way for Soviet literature in translation.

In the sixth and last of our 2020 events in collaboration with the Anglo-Russian Research Network, Sarah Gear shares insights into the facts and figures behi...