Gogol and Pavlova are rarely discussed together, yet they were contemporaries who changed the fate of Russian literature in their very different ways. Gogol’s gifts were widely celebrated in his own day while Pavlova’s talents have been properly acknowledged only in the last forty years by scholars, notably Barbara Heldt, who have rediscovered a rich tradition of Russian women’s writing. This double book launch – of a new, revised edition of Heldt’s translation of Pavlova’s prose-poetry masterpiece, A Double Life, and Oliver Ready’s new translations of Gogol’s ‘essential’ stories – will set these two intriguing figures side by side. Both were outsiders in the Russian culture of their day; both were fascinated by lives hidden from society’s view; and both explored questions of gender and sexuality with fearless imagination.
Discussion with the translators will be chaired by Daniel Green, a scholar of both authors.
Copies of Karolina Pavlova, A Double Life, trans. Barbara Heldt (Columbia University Press, 2019) and Nikolai Gogol, And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon, trans. Oliver Ready (Pushkin Press, 2019) will be available for purchase.
In English
Barbara Heldt is a retired Russianist living in Oxford and Maine. Most of her career was spent as Professor of Russian and Women's Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her book Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature was published in 1987.
Oliver Ready teaches Russian at Oxford, where he is a Research Fellow of St Antony’s College. His translations include Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics) and Vladimir Sharov’s novel The Rehearsals. He is the author of Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013, and is currently writing a book on Gogol in Reaktion’s series Critical Lives.
Daniel Green teaches Russian literature at the University of Cambridge. He is researching the symbolism of dress in Russian literature in the first half of the nineteenth century, including in works by Gogol and Pavlova.