The Keynote address from the 2024 AATSEEL Conference.

Marcus C. Levitt is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Slavic Languages and Litera- tures, University of Southern California. He has written on a broad spectrum of Russian topics from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Many of his works focus on the genesis of modern Russian literature and on the status of the visible in Russian culture. His books include Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (1989), Early Modern Russian Letters: Selected Articles (2009), and The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (2011).

This paper examines Eduard Huber’s translation of Faust I (1838), the first complete translation into Russian, in the context of Goethe’s translation theory (Notes to West- Eastern Divan, 1819) and Berman’s The Experience of the Foreign (1984). Goethe’s insights shed light on Huber’s text, and Huber’s translation, in turn, elucidates specific pitfalls that Goethe’s theory of epochs did not anticipate: the impact of censor- ship, the influence of the translator’s melancholic persona, the urge to fit into the Russian Romantic tradition, and limitations of the Russian metrical system. These four factors align with Berman’s “systems of deformation” which result from the “cultural resistance” to any translation. My article, structured around these deformations, demonstrates in detail how the receiving culture resists translation in the case of Huber’s Faust. The original is altered in the spheres of religion, politics, and sexual- ity; Huber gives Faust and secondary characters his own lyric voice, introduces Romantic motifs, and adjusts some German meters. Overall, Huber’s translation does not fit neatly into any of Goethe’s “translation epochs.” It is “parodistic,” yet in the metrical sphere it sometimes moves towards what Goethe called the “highest” trans- lation epoch. Huber’s translation not only enriches Goethe’s theory but also, while telling the story of Faust, implicitly tells Huber’s own story, as well as the story of Russia’s literary development.

Veronika Schmitt is a PhD candidate in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. Her research interests include translation studies and the reciprocal influences of German and Russian literature.

This article situates Mikhail Kuzmin’s 1906 novel Wings in contemporary discussions of visual aesthetics, especially in relation to what Whitney Davis (2010) theorizes as “queer beauty.” The article explores Kuzmin’s attempt to represent “non-abstract love” between men by navigating the aesthetic extremes of abstraction and idealiza- tion, as represented by the Russian Symbolists, and vulgarity and obscenity, as repre- sented in French literature of the time. In particular, the article focuses on two under- studied influences, Dmitrii Merezhkovsky’s Voskresshie bogi: Leonardo da Vinci (1900), in which wings is a major motif, and Anatole France’s Le Lys rouge (1896), the color symbolism of which has much in common with that of Kuzmin’s Wings. Read against these two works and Kuzmin’s comments on aesthetics scattered throughout his diary and letters, this article seeks to add nuance to our understanding of the aesthetic positioning of Kuzmin’s novel both within the Russian context and within the larger European scene.

Brian James Baer is Professor of Translation Studies at Kent State University. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation. His major publications include the monographs Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity, Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature and Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire, as well as several collected volumes including Queer(ing) Russian Art (2023), with Yevgeniy Fix. He is the translator of Juri Lotman’s monograph The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (2013), and a recent collection of essays by Lotman on cultural memory.

One of the most widely-used sources for Russian literature of the Silver Age was The Book of Revelation, the final prophetic book of the New Testament. Mikhail Bulgakov also turned to apocalyptic prophesy, developing and re-interpreting its motifs and sym- bols in his prose and drama and creating a unified, structured, and constantly developing plot of the apocalyptic collapse of the world based on crucial elements from The Book of Revelation. The objective of this study is to analyze some of the most significant apocalyptic references in Bulgakov’s first semi-autobiographical novel, The White Guard, which was based on the historic events of the Civil War in Ukraine. The analysis focuses on intertextual elements in the form of direct quotations and key allu- sions as well as on the role of dreams in establishing parallels with the apocalyptic prophecy. The apocalyptic theme resounds incessantly throughout the novel and this study takes as its premise that a parallel reading of The Book of Revelation is necessary for a proper interpretation. I will analyze those aspects of the text that refer to the apocalyptic prophecy, so that ongoing discussions on the apocalyptic undertones of The White Guard will have fresh and relevant material from which to draw. The apocalyptic plot in Bulgakov’s description of the horrors of the Civil War unfolds at all textual levels, comprising an overall eschatological impression of a narrative sated with quotations and allusions from The Book of Revelation that reach beyond the literary space of the novel, highlighting and re-evaluating a fundamental question about human destiny caught in the dreadful upheaval of a historic apocalypse.

Natalia Kaloh Vidis Associate Professor at the Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Slovenia. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Translation studies, and her second PhD is in Contemporary Russian Literature and Mihkail Bulgakov’s words. She is the author of five scientific monographies, including Rol ́ apokalipticheskogo otkroveniia v tvorchestve Mikhaila Bulgakova (The Role of Revelation in Mikhail Bulgakov’s works), published in 2012, and more than one hundred scientific articles and chapters.

The present article is devoted to analyzing the representation of the garden in post- Soviet drama, covering the works of the most popular and influential women drama- tists, Liudmila Razumovskaia (A Garden Without Soil, 1982), Nina Iskrenko (Is the Cherry Orchard Sold?, 1993), Ekaterina Narshi (The Shadow of a Tree, 2003), and Nina Sadur (The Garden’s Doctor, 2011) in relation to Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. I offer a new interpretation of the creative engagement of modern dramatists with their Russian literary hypertext by presenting The Cherry Orchard as both the primary donor text of the garden spatial marker and an object of refutation. The article argues that modern women’s drama inherits the duality of environmental space from Chekhov’s play: the garden topos functions as the existential environment for the female protagonist, whereas the garden locusepitomizes natural (and exploitable) space. Women’s drama represents the garden as intrinsically connected with the fate of the female dramatis personae: as a locus, the garden with its nature is doomed to destruction; as a metaphysical topos, it brings devastation, ruin and death to the principal heroines. The innovative treatment of the garden locus and topos in modern Russian women’s drama is based on an aesthetic and theatrical experiment with the Chekhovian heritage, which consists in the gradual defamiliarizing of environmental space achieved through the introduction of a modern socio-political context. I demonstrate that in modern plays, the duality of the spatial marker, based on the distinction of a geographical locus and a metaphysical topos, becomes central to decoding their primary message and to revealing their contribution to modern theatre.

Katherine A. New is Lecturer in Russian at Oriel College, Oxford. She specializes in Russo- phone drama and has published widely on eighteenth- to twenty-first-century Russian lit- erature, culture, and translation theory, including a recent article on Pavel Katenin’s Political Theater (The Russian Review, 2024). Katherine has a forthcoming monograph on mythological drama by Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish playwrights and is currently working on a second monograph entitled Conflict and Trauma in Slavic Women’s Drama.

Despite a near-universal acknowledgement of the mimetic power of Yuri Trifonov’s writing, both Soviet and contemporary criticism read tends to read his characters allegorically, as representatives for moral, historical, or ethnographic categories. Tak- ing inspiration from a 1972 essay by Trifonov himself that insists on the equal treat- ment of literary and living persons, this paper examines the peculiar ways in which minor characters are depicted across Trifonov’s oeuvre precisely because of the author’s commitment to treating his characters as representations of living individu- als. Starting with Alexander Woloch’s concept of the “character-space,” the first sec- tion of the article looks at the ways in which the fates of minor characters are consis- tently given account no matter their significance to the narrative, arguing that Trifonov’s character system is one built upon the principle of acquaintance and not. The second half of the article looks at the prominence of physical objects in Tri- fonov’s works that serve as indexes for absent characters, marking a shift from repre- sentation through depiction towards a novel technique of the “indexical characteriza- tion” in Another Life (1975) and The Old Man (1980).

David Parker is Assistant Teaching Professor of Russian at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics. He completed his doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on characterization in late Soviet prose, Yugoslav modernism and Yugoslavism, and late Soviet culture.

This article analyzes the soundtrack of the popular Soviet holiday film Ironiia sud'by: ili s legkim parom! (Irony of Fate: or Enjoy your Bath!, 1976, dir. El'dar Riazanov), the inclusion of Modernist poetry (by Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva) and poetry from the 1960s (by Yevgeny Evtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina) set to song in particular. The article aims to explore the apparent incongruity between “difficult” poetry and popular film. After introducing the film and its musical context in guitar poetry culture, I explore the mechanism I term “folklorization,” by which this incon- gruity is not palpable. Drawing on theoretical insights into Russian Golden Age poetic culture, I argue that the film’s soundtrack acts as an al'bom of twentieth- century Russian poetry and that the late Soviet context of the film echoes the nine- teenth-century salon in the pragmatic orientation of poetry. The article then provides two case studies of the poets featured on the soundtrack – Marina Tsvetaeva and Bella Akhmadulina – as illustrations of the mechanisms by which the soundtrack functions. In the case of Tsvetaeva’s diptych and most notably “Khochu u zerkala, gde mut'” (“I want to find out from the murky mirror”) from the Podruga (“Girlfriend”) cycle, I examine how the inclusion of these poems in the film erases the poet’s biographical queer identity and subsumes the poem-texts’ resistance to patriarchal modes of writing into traditional gender roles. An analysis of Akhmadulina’s “Po ulitse moei kotoryi god” (“Along my street every year”) showcases the paradoxical nature of late Soviet intelligentsia’s sense of community as well as its hermeticism. The conclusion extrapolates on the insights developed from these case studies, bringing them into the larger context of the late Soviet intelligentsia’s self-conception and its broader socio- cultural implications, considering the role of irony and double-coding.

Venya Gushchin is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on the late styles of Russian Modernist poets. His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Elizaveta Mnatasakanova have received the Columbia University Slavic Department Pushkin Prize. Blockade Swallow, selected poems by Olga Berggolts translated by Gushchin, appeared from Smokestack Books in 2022. Most recently, his translation of Yevsey Tseytlin’s Rereading Silence was published by Bagriy & Company. His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Full Stop, Jacket2, Cardinal Points, and elsewhere.