Talk: A Fresh Look at Nikolai Gogol and Karolina Pavlova

Pushkin House invites to join the talk two authors, Gogol and Pavlova, 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 has 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