Category: Author Interviews

Translator Interview: Anna Kurkina Rush, Peter France, & Christopher Rush, translators of Küchlya: Decembrist Poet. A Novel

Translator Interview: Anna Kurkina Rush, Peter France, & Christopher Rush, translators of Küchlya: Decembrist Poet. A Novel

“[I]s it a biography? an adventure story? a historical novel about the period in Russian history at a pivotal moment – its first attempted and abortive revolution, the Decembrist uprising of 1825? Or is after all the mainspring of the novel Russian literature played out by characters conjured up by the author’s imagination? Characters familiar by name to every Russian schoolchild (Pushkin, Krylov, Zhukovsky) leap off the page as live people, fascinating, memorable. And of course, the protagonist of the novel, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, hardly known to Tynianov’s contemporaries, a long-forgotten poet and Pushkin’s lycée friend, is in particular, Tynianov’s tour de force.”

An Interview with Charles J. Halperin, author of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historical Memory since 1991

An Interview with Charles J. Halperin, author of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Historical Memory since 1991

“I suspect that there is something in every country’s history that some of its residents would rather forget. For reasons that remain unclear Ivan the Terrible made war on his own people. Unfortunately Ivan’s reign was so important in Russian history in both domestic and foreign affairs that it is impossible to avoid. To further complicate matters the surviving sources on his reign are often contested, either because they are biased (which applies to native as well as foreigner accounts) or are extant only in seventeenth-century manuscripts which compromises their authenticity and accuracy. There are major gaps in the types of evidence that have survived; for example, we have no personal rather than public documents from Ivan. Therefore there is a wide space for legitimate scholarly disagreement. But Ivan’s controversial identity goes well beyond these academic considerations.”