The Pushkin Club invites you to a discussion and reading of Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems with the poets and translators, including Maria Bloshteyn, Robert Chandler and Julia Nemirovskaya.
Russia’s war with Ukraine has resulted in an extraordinary outpouring of anti-war poems from poets living in Ukraine, the diaspora, and within Russia itself, where even calling Putin’s “special military operation” a war can result in up to fifteen years of incarceration. Julia Nemirovskaya, a Russian-American poet and scholar, founded the Kopilka Project (Russian for ‘coin bank’) to collect and safeguard Russophone wartime poems reflecting the outrage, grief and shame at the ongoing war. The project has since attracted a group of US, UK and Canadian poets, translators and scholars, and now numbers over a thousand poems by more than two-hundred plus Russophone poets living in Ukraine, Russia and the diaspora.
Disbelief, brought out by UK’s Smokestack Books and five outstanding translators – Maria Bloshteyn, Andrei Burago, Richard Coombes, Anna Krushelnitskaya and Dmitry Manin – is the first anthology of some of the most hard-hitting and moving poems from the Kopilka Project, alongside their English translations.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Maria Bloshteyn received her PhD from Toronto’s York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Her main scholarly interests lie in the field of literary and cultural exchange between Russia and the United States. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (University of Toronto Press, 2007), the translator of Alexander Galich’s Dress Rehearsal: A Story in Four Acts and Five Chapters (Slavica, 2009) and Anton Chekhov’s The Prank (NYRB Classics, 2015), and the editor of Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War (Smokestack Books, 2020). Her translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).
Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian, mostly for NYRB Classics, include works by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolay Leskov; several collections of stories and memoirs by Teffi; and novels and stories by Vasily Grossman, Andrey Platonov and Hamid Ismailov. He is the editor and main translator of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. Together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, he has co-edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. He has also translated selections of Sappho and Apollinaire. He runs regular translation workshops in London and teaches for an annual literary translation summer school, currently titled BRISTOL TRANSLATES. His most recent publications are Pushkin’s Peter the Great’s African and Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal, both co-translated with his wife Elizabeth.
Julia Nemirovskaya is a Moscow-born poet and author. She was part of Kirill Kovaldzhi’s Poetry Seminar, as well as a member of the famed Moscow Poetry Club of New Wave Poets. She published several collections of verse and short stories, a novel, and a book on Russian cultural history, Inside the Russian Soul: An Historical Survey of Russian Cultural Patterns (McGraw-Hill, 1997, 2001). Her work has appeared in Znamya, LRS-Lettres russes, Asymptote and elsewhere, and has been translated into several languages. She is currently teaching and directing student theatre at the University of Oregon.