Author: Olga Zilberbourg

Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also dives into topics of bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Anthony Marra called it “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope,” and Karen Bender said, “Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.” Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California. She has published four collections of stories in Russia, including most recent Задержи дыхание [Hold Your Breath] from Vremya Press. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.

Kritika’s Feminist Issue

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Kritika is “a leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history and culture, Kritika is dedicated to internationalizing the field and making it relevant to a broad interdisciplinary audience,” and this particular issue features many voices of women who have contributed to Russian feminist criticism.

Of particular interest are personal essays by Natalia Pushkareva, Barbara Engel, Eve Levin, David L. Ransel, and Christine D. Worobec.

From the introduction to this section of the issue:

Russian women’s history—and we use the qualifier “Russian” advisedly, as focused analysis of the intersection of gender with imperial contexts and identities mainly began in the 1990s—formed in dialogue with these broader developments, drawing many of its inspirations and models from non-Russian fields.5 At the same time, it also evolved within the particular context of the Cold War—which had both practical ramifications, such as limited access to archival sources, and more complex political and ideological ones. In the Soviet Union, the “woman question” had long been relegated to a secondary status before class and social structure, which helped marginalize the history of women institutionally and as a topic of study. Early contributions to the field in the United States, such as Richard Stites’s important monograph on what he called “the women’s liberation movement,” tended to focus on activists and elites; the sources were more readily available, as was an abiding interest in radical politics, if told here with an original focus on women that included the powerful movement of so-called “bourgeois” feminism.6 Although Cold War politics and ideological differences helped shape distinctive academic cultures between east and west, scholarly exchange and travel also began to break down some of these barriers during the 1970s, a process that accelerated in the 1980s and after.

This academic publication is accessible here through Project Muse and your nearest academic (and some public) library subscription.

New Book Alert: Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version (2nd Edition)

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Author: Elena Fanailova

Translators: Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse

Website: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/the-russian-version-2nd-edition/

Small Press Distribution announcement: ” Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler. THE RUSSIAN VERSION is a collection of poems that spans Russia’s post-Soviet era. Acclaimed journalist and poet, Elena Fanailova tells stories about the various social layers of a stratified and conflicted nation, reclaiming the poet’s role as social critic, while scrutinizing her own position as citizen and poet. Fanailova’s political lyricism casts personal pain into the net of historical suffering.”

Published in 2009 by Ugly Duckling Presse, it received Best Translated Book Award for Poetry from Three Percent. The 2019 second edition of THE RUSSIAN VERSION includes a more recent long poem, ‘Lena and Lena.’

I Want a Baby and Other Plays

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

I’m delighted to hear that Glagoslav published a volume of Sergei Tretiakov’s plays, including “I Want a Baby!” in translation by Robert Leach and Stephen Holland.

Tretiakov was one of the most innovative and exciting playwrights and thinkers of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. I doubt that we would describe his work as feminist or even proto-feminist today, but he definitely had fascinating ideas about rethinking gender roles.

Back in grad school, I wrote a paper on this one. Here’s a description of the central character from this play: Milda Grignau, a woman at the center of Tretiakov’s text, is very successful in the public sphere: she is a specialist in agronomy, a respected member of the Communist Party, and a social organizer. She does not have a family and does not want one; what she does want is to have a child. The main conflict of the play revolves around Milda’s desire to give birth without getting married. She requires a man’s help in order to conceive, but protests against the tradition requiring women to be married before giving birth. “Having a husband isn’t important. What’s important is who produces the baby,” Milda Grignau proclaims at a community meeting called to discuss her abnormal sexual practices.

Order this book here: http://www.glagoslav.com/en/Book/1/208/I-Want-a-Baby-and-Other-Plays.html

“What’s the difference between a word and a sigh?” #marcchagall

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Marc Chagall’s book is, in part, a fascinating portrait of the life in the stetl.

kaggsysbookishramblings's avatarKaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

My Life by Marc Chagall
Translated by Dorothy Williams

When I was rushing through St. Pancras station in the summer, en route to the Midlands and a visit to the Aged Parent and the Offspring, I made time to pop into their little branch of Hatchards. It’s a small but perfectly formed shop which always has interestingly-themed tables, and I rarely come out empty-handed. This occasion was no different, and I was tempted specifically by this lovely Penguin Modern Classics version of Marc Chagall’s “My Life”. It called to me particularly as I was heavily absorbed in Victor Serge’s Notebooks; and Chagall’s book deals also with exile from Russia. So of course I picked up a copy… To be honest, though, you couldn’t really get two more dissimilar books than the Notebooks and this one. In size, writing style and subject Chagall and Serge are complete opposites; though both…

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Profile of Lisa Hayden

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 5 Comments

One of our star translators from Russian got a lovely write-up in the Portland Press Herald. Personally, I first came to know Lisa through her amazing blog, dedicated to Russian literature, Lizok’s Bookshelf. It’s somehow wonderful to learn that Lisa grew up in a town called Norway, Maine. That’s such a big name for a town, and I’ve always wondered what it’s like to grow up in these places that are named after other places. (I say this, having spent considerable amount of time in my childhood thinking about Lenin’s relationship with Leningrad.)

Hayden grew up mostly in Norway, in Oxford County, where her family moved from New Hampshire when she was about 9. She first became interested in Russia and Russian history as a child because of stories published in Jack and Jill magazine based on the Russian fairy tale Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga is a Slavic folklore tale about a “grandmother witch” who lives deep in the forest and is not very good, but is not entirely evil.


When she was in the sixth grade, Hayden read her first English translation of Russian literature, a short story called “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov.

To learn more about Lisa Hayden, read the story here.

Klavdia Smola’s: Reinventing the Tradition. Contemporary Russian-Jewish Literature.

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

This book comes to us from Germany, with the promise of the Russian-language edition in the next year (thanks to the always wonderful NLO Press). Klavdia Smola (PhD from Technischen Universität Dresden) examines Soviet-era Jewish underground literature from the 1960s and 1970s to the beginning of the 21st Century, and studies the way this literature relates to the tradition of Jewish literature and to the official literature of the Soviet Union.

The book is available from Vandenhoek & Ruprecht Verlage.

Der Kampf sowjetischer Juden um das Recht der Emigration nach Israel führte seit der zweiten Hälfte der 1960er Jahre zu einer jüdischen Kulturrenaissance im Raum des Inoffiziellen. Literatur, die aus der Feder nonkonformer jüdischer Intellektueller in Russland, Israel, Amerika und Deutschland entstand, schöpfte nun erneut aus den jüdischen und judaistischen Kulturquellen und nahm so den jüdischen “cultural revival” der postsowjetischen Periode bis in die Gegenwart vorweg. Diese Rückkehr förderte jedoch nicht nur Poetiken der Erinnerung und Rekonstruktion, sondern auch der imaginativen Subversion und des performativen Bruchs. Diese Studie erschließt das Phänomen der wiedererfundenen Tradition in der russisch-jüdischen Literatur seit den 1960er Jahren im Dialog mit aktuellen Kultur- und Literaturtheorien.

Or, in Russian,

В монографии прослеживается, как в русско-еврейской литературе после долгого периода ассимиляции, Холокоста и десятилетий официального (полу-)запрета на еврейство заново «изобреталась» еврейская традиция. Процесс «переизобретения традиции» (Хобсбаум) начался в контркультуре еврейских диссидентов-отказников, в среде позднесоветского андерграунда 1960-1970-ых годов, и продолжается, как показывает проза 2000-2010-ых, до настоящего момента. Он обусловлен тем фактом, что еврейская литература создается для читателя «постгуманной» эпохи, когда знание о еврействе и иудаизме передается и принимается уже не от живых носителей традиции ‒ из семейного и коллективного окружения, но из книг, картин, фильмов, музеев и популярной культуры. Такое «постисторическое» знание, однако, результат не только социальных катастроф, официального забвения и диктатуры, но и секуляризации, культурного ресайклинга традиций, свойственного эпохе (пост-)модерна. Оно соединяет реконструкцию с мифотворчеством, культурный перевод с практиками создания вторичного – культурно опосредованного – коллективного «воспоминания», ученый комментарий с фольклоризацией. Когда «естественная» преемственность уже невозможна, а традиционная герменевтика (прошлого) натыкается на лакуны, следы и фрагменты, литература сама становится тропом памяти, восполняющим потерю своими собственными символическими средствами.
Бóльшая часть монографии посвящена советскому еврейскому андерграунду и вышедшей из него прозе эксодуса (еврейского исхода). Автор показывает, как в процессе возвращения ассимилированных позднесоветских евреев к своим корням в литературе возникала альтернатива соцреалистическому канону (подобно множеству других альтернатив периода позднего коммунизма, например, деревенской прозе или ре-этнизации литератур советских республик) и в то же время во многом его зеркальное отражение. Телеологию прозы алии/исхода «пересекает» скептический, антисионистский литературный нарратив тех же лет ‒ и она же отдается поздним эхом в новом консерватизме и почвенничестве еврейской литературы 2010-х годов.
В этой же главе изучается возрождение идишского сказа и восточноеврейского фольклора в 1970-1980-ые годы.
Вторая большая глава монографии посвящена постсоветской и новейшей русско-еврейской литературе: с одной стороны, постмемориальной поэтике культурной памяти и «придуманных воспоминаний», с другой, поэтике дискурсивной деконструкции языка и идеологии советской империи.
В целом автор показывает, как современная русско-еврейская литература, не будучи продуктом живой преемственности, обращается к традициям еврейской письменности, начиная с библейского и средневекового иудаизма и кончая раннесоветскими (анти-)сионистскими романами, и «переписывает» например сатиру маскилов, хассидский мидраш или идишские травелоги. Исследуются как совсем или почти неизвестные, так и уже отмеченные критикой тексты еврейских авторов, перформативно «изобретающих» еврейскую традицию. Таким образом переосмысливается сама история русской литературы, ставится под вопрос ее монокультурный (славянский) контекст.
Помещая русско-еврейскую литературу в общие макрокультурные рамки эпохи, автор обращается к теории гуманитарной мысли последних десятилетий: культурной семиотике Юрия Лотмана и Бориса Успенского, работам о мифе Мирсеи Элиаде, геопоэтике Кеннета Уайта, теориям культурной памяти Алеиды и Яна Ассманов и постпамяти Марианне Хирш, постколониальным и постимпериальным исследованиям, а также наследию постструктурализма.

“An eternal vagabond of life and the idea” #victorserge @nyrbclassics

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

kaggsysbookishramblings's avatarKaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

Notebooks 1936-1947 by Victor Serge
Translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman

As I’ve mentioned on the Ramblings (and on any kind of social media I happen to be near!), I’ve been rather absorbed in the Notebooks of Victor Serge over the past couple of weeks. The very wonderful NYRB Classics seem to fly the flag for him; several of his novels and his “Memoirs of Revolutionary” are available in their imprint (and I’ve read most of them…) However, this volume really is something special, and I’ll share some thoughts on it below – though I fear these will not really do the book justice. I’m sorry – this is going to be a long post!

The Notebooks

Serge’s real name was Victor Lvovich Kibalchich and he was born in Brussels to Russian parents. His life was a peripatetic one, moving from place to place – France, Spain, Russia to…

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