Notes on Contributors
Anton Alekseevskii
is a professional flautist, and composer for film and theatre. In 2015 he began working at the Foundation for Establishing the Joseph Brodsky Literary Museum in St Petersburg, and since 2017 he has been the executive director of the Foundation. As part of this work, over the years 2015–17, he organized a lecture project called ‘A Part of Speech’, involving writers, musicians, and friends of the poet, and open to the public in the memorial space of Brodsky’s ‘Room and a Half’. In 2021–23 the Foundation filmed a series of interviews about Brodsky, as well as a film about Mikhail Milchik. Most recently in 2023 they made a film entitled Brodsky. Trial.
Joe Andrew
studied Modern Languages at Oxford University. He was appointed to a Lectureship at Keele University in 1972, where he remained until retirement in 2018; he is now Professor Emeritus. He taught Russian literature and language for many years, before setting up a degree in Film Studies. He has published extensively, with over 25 books, most recently Tolstoi: Art and Influence, edited with Robert Reid (Brill, 2023). Most of his publications are on nineteenth-century Russian literature, but he has also written on twentieth-century Russian literature, as well as Russian and British film. He was co-chair of the Neo-Formalist Circle for over 30 years, and co-edited the Circle’s journal, Essays in Poetics from its first number in 1976 till its last in 2006.
Arina Bedrina
has an MA in history, for which she wrote a thesis entitled The ‘Soviet’ in Brodsky’s Works Written in Emigration. She started working first as a volunteer for the Foundation for Establishing the Joseph Brodsky Literary Museum in St Petersburg in 2012, and since 2018 she has been Deputy Executive Director. She is a professional writer, specializing in poetry, and is a member of the Russian Writers’ Union. A translator by profession, she has been working in the games development industry since 2012. Currently she translates and edits videogames, poetry, social projects, history books and articles. Since 2017, she has been carrying out the project of cataloguing and transporting to Russia Valentina Polukhina’s vast archive dedicated to Brodsky and poetry in general.
David M. Bethea
is the Vilas Research Professor (emeritus) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books and articles on Russian literature and Russian thought have been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, The New York Times, the NEH, the ACLS, and his own scholarly community (AATSEEL), which awarded him a lifetime achievement award in 2003. Currently Bethea is the academic director of the Pushkin Summer Institute, which he founded in 2012.
Andrei Dobritsyn
is maı̂tre d’enseignement et de recherche at the Department of Slavic and South Asian Studies of the University of Lausanne. He is the author of Eternal genre (Вечный жанр), a book on Western European origins of the Russian epigrams of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and numerous articles on Russian poetry in the European context from classical antiquity to modernism, and on the statistical analysis of poetry.
Marat Grinberg
is a Professor of Russian, Comparative Literature, and Film Studies at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Among his books are ‘I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left’: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2013); Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016); and The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (2023). His forthcoming book is an annotated translation of Mikhail Goldis’ Memoirs of a Jewish Public Prosecutor from Soviet Ukraine.
Katharine Hodgson
is Professor in Russian at the University of Exeter. She led a project on post-Soviet changes to the canon of twentieth-century poetry written in Russian, leading to a co-edited 2017 volume of essays and a 2020 book on the twentieth-century poetry canon and Russian national identity, co-authored with Alexandra Smith. Hodgson’s other publications mainly cover poetry of the Soviet period, particularly Olga Berggolts and wartime poetry, as well as the translation of the work of poets such as Kipling, Heine, and Brecht into Russian. She is now exploring the way that poets used dedications to other poets, quotation and allusion in their own texts to define their poetic affinities and identities during the Soviet period.
Zakhar Ishov
is a researcher at Uppsala University. His areas of expertise include Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, and intersections between humanities and social sciences. His monograph Brodsky in English (2023) examines Brodsky’s radical project of translating his own poems into ‘new originals’ in English. His new project ‘Dangerous Russian Poets’, which was awarded a grant by the Swedish Research Council (2022) posits an unprecedented role played by poetry in the last decades of the Soviet regime, that of fomenting political dissent and civil disobedience.
Sergei Liapin
is an independent researcher in St Petersburg. He has published extensively in the field of quantitative poetics and verse theory. Many of his articles are devoted to Russian poets from Gavriil Derzhavin and Alexander Pushkin to Marina Tsvetaeva and Joseph Brodsky.
Mikhail Milchik
was born in 1934 in Leningrad, where he remained with his mother during the blockade. He has a PhD in Art History, is a member of the Union of Architects of Russia and the Council for Conservation of Cultural Heritage of the Government of St Petersburg. He is currently a leading researcher at the Institute of the History of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is the author of more than 350 publications, including 36 books. He was a founder of the ‘Places of Joseph Brodsky’ series, for which he wrote three books. He met Brodsky in 1963 and remained a friend of the poet for the rest of his life. He is the Chair of the Board of the Joseph Brodsky Museum Foundation and co-author of the concept of the ‘Room and a Half’ museum in the poet’s Leningrad apartment.
Robin Milner-Gulland
learned Russian on the National Service Interpreters’ Course, then studied Modern Languages at New College, Oxford, with a postgraduate year in Moscow. In 1962 he devised a course in Russian Studies within the School of European Studies for the new University of Sussex, where he continued to teach Russian and a variety of cultural topics till 2001, retiring as Emeritus Professor. Among his many publications are The Russians (Blackwell, 1998); Cultural Atlas of Russia and the Soviet Union (Phaidon, 1989); various contributions to Essays in Poetics, including on Kharms, Zabolotskii et al.; Patterns of Russia – History, Culture, Spaces (Reaktion, 2020); Andrey Rublev – the Artist and his World (Reaktion, 2023); and several translations.
Henrietta Mondry
is Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. She has published widely on Russian literature and cultural history. Her latest research interests include bioethics and post-memory in Russian-Jewish writing. Among her recent publications are Embodied Differences: The Jew’s Body and Materiality (2021), Dostoevsky i evrei (2021) and ‘The Politics of Nostalgia: Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov and Mikhalkov’s Film Adaptation’ (2023).
Igor Pilshchikov
is Professor and Chair of the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages & Cultures, and Research Professor of Cultural Semiotics and Russian Literature at Tallinn University. He is a founding academic editor of the Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature & Folklore (feb-web.ru), Russian Virtual Library (rvb.ru) and the information system CPCL: Comparative Poetics and Comparative Literature (cpcl.info), editor of the journals Studia Metrica et Poetica (University of Tartu Press) and Pushkin Review (Slavica Publishers). He has authored three books, including two monographs on the Russian ‘Golden Age’ poets Alexander Pushkin and Konstantin Batiushkov, and more than 200 articles on Russian poetry, poetics, verse theory, comparative literature, Slavic literary theories, and digital humanities.
Robert Reid
is an Honorary Fellow of Keele University and specializes in nineteenth-century Russian literature. As well as a number of articles and essays his publications include Problems of Russian Romanticism (Gower, 1983), Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri: Themes, Character, Sociology (Rodopi, 1995) and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (Bristol Classical Press, 1997). He has collaborated with Joe Andrew on several edited works including Two Hundred Years of Pushkin (Rodopi, 2003 and 2004) and Aspects of Dostoevskii: Art, Ethics and Faith (Rodopi, 2012), as well as two recent volumes on Tolstoi published by Brill. He has also translated Russian poetry and contributed to collections by Prigov, Prokofiev, Rein and Sedakova.
Maria Rubins
is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She has written broadly on modernism, diaspora, Russian literature, cultural relations between France and Russia, Art deco and the Jazz Age in European literature and culture and other topics. Her current research addresses the interaction between Hebrew, Arabic and Russophone literatures in the geopolitical and multicultural context of the Middle East. Her books include Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French poetry (2000), Russian Montparnasse: Transnational writing in interwar Paris (2015), and Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020 (2021). She has also published over 100 articles and book chapters and edited several annotated volumes of Russian émigré prose. Maria Rubins is a translator of fiction from English and French into Russian, including books by Elizabeth Gaskell, Irène Némirovsky, Judith Gautier, and Arnaud Delalande. For more information visit: mariarubins.com.
Natasha Rulyova
is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests spread across 20th and 21st century Russophone literature, translation studies, multilingualism, genre studies and post-Soviet media culture. Her monograph Joseph Brodsky: Collaborative Self-Translation (Bloomsbury, 2020) is based on an archival study of the poet’s texts and explores Brodsky’s self-translation practices, his approach to writing as a late bilingual in English, and his multiple collaborations with translators, peer poets and editors. The chapter in this volume continues to study Brodsky’s multilingual and translingual writing. Her current project is focused on 21st century Russophone authors.
Olga Sedakova
is a poet, essayist, translator, and philologist. She is the author of 83 books in Russian and other languages, including collections of poems, translations and prose, philosophical, theological and philological studies, as well as poems and prose for children. Her poems have been translated into dozens of languages. She received her degree of Candidate of Philological Sciences for her thesis ‘Funeral Rites of the Eastern and Southern Slavs’ in 1983, and became an Honorary Doctor of Theology at the European Humanities University in Minsk in 2003. She was awarded the honour of Officier d’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République Française in 2012; became an Academician of the Academy ‘Sapientia et Scientia’ in Rome, in 2013; and of the ‘Ambrosiana’ Academy in Milan in 2014. She is the winner of many literary prizes, Russian and international, including Andrei Bely (St Petersburg, 1983), Christian Roots of Europe, or Vladimir Soloviev Prize (Vatican, 1998), Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (Moscow, 2003), Dante Alighieri Prize (Rome, 2011), and the LericiPea Prize for her whole career. Most recently she has been translating and researching Dante.
Alexandra Smith
is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has published extensively on Russian literature and culture and published the following books: Poetic Canons, Cultural Memory and Russian National Identity after 1991 (co-authored with Katharine Hodgson, Peter Lang, 2020; the book was awarded the BASEES prize for the best book published in 2020); Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon (co-edited with Katharine Hodgson and Joanne Shelton, Open Book Publishers, 2017); Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian 20th-century Poetry (Peter Lang, 2006); Pesn peresmeshnika: Pushkin v tvorchestve Mariny Tsvetaevoi (Ellis Lak, 1998); and The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Work of Marina Tsvetaeva (Peter Lang, 1994). She also co-edited (with Olga Sobolev) and contributed to the book on film adaptations of Russian literature: Film Adaptations of Russian Literature. Dialogue and Authorship (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
Olga Sobolev
is Director of the Language, Culture and Society Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests lie in comparative studies and concern nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and European culture. Recent publications include: Film Adaptations of Russian Classics (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), ‘Tolstoi’s Resurrection on the Russian Stage’ in Tolstoi: Art and Influence (Brill, 2023); ‘Alfred Lord Tennyson and an Imperial Russian Gift’ in Russian Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy (Brill, 2023); From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s (Peter Lang, 2017); ‘Representation of H. G. Wells on the Russian Stage and Screen’ in H. G. Wells and All Things Russian (Anthem Press, 2019); ‘Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Russia’, in Reception of Tennyson in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2016); The Only Hope of the World: G. B. Shaw and Russia (Peter Lang, 2012).
Carol Ueland
is Professor Emerita of Russian at Drew University where she directed the Russian Studies program. Her most recent book is Literary Biographies in the Lives of Remarkable People Series in Russia, co-edited with Ludmilla A. Trigos (Lexington Books, 2022) including their co-authored introduction ‘Writing and Rewriting the Literary Canon: A History of Russian Biography in the Lives of Remarkable People Series’. She also wrote Between Biography and Mythology: The Russian and American Lives of Joseph Brodsky, a Russian translation of which appeared in the May 2023 issue of Zvezda. She recently contributed to and edited with Nadezhda Azhgikhina and Natalia Ivanova, Glasnost in Two Cultures (Moscow, 2023). Her book-length translations include Apollo in the Snow: Aleksandr Kushner Selected Poems 1962–1988, with poet Paul Graves, with an introduction by Joseph Brodsky (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991); Apollo in the Grass: Aleksandr Kushner Selected Poems, with poet Robert Carnevale (New York, Farrar, Straus, 2015).
Willem G. Weststeijn
is Emeritus Professor of Slavic literatures at the University of Amsterdam. He has published a great deal on Russian literature, particularly on the avant-garde, and was for many years the editor-in-chief of the journal Russian Literature. Currently he is translating the poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov into Dutch. His latest publications are a history of Old Russian literature (in Dutch, Amsterdam, 2023) and Not Every ‘I’ is Me, a collection of articles on the lyric subject (Amsterdam, 2023).