In collaboration with Pushkin House, Natasha Rulyova continues her series of conversations with contemporary Russophone authors. Join us for this online event with award-winning author Dina Rubina. First a pre-recorded interview will be screened with English subtitles, and afterwards the author will join us for a live Q&A session.
Dina Rubina’s novels, such as her trilogy Russkaya kanareika (The Russian Canary) span over several generations and take readers around the world. Many plot lines often start in former Soviet republics, such as Kazakhstan, Ukraine or Russia (for example, in Na solnechnoi storone ulitsy (On the Sunny Side of the Street), Zheltukhin (Zhetukhin), and Golos (The Voice)). However, her protagonists, male or female, are likely to run away from their real or adopted parents’ home and roam the world from Vienna to Thailand, from London to Rio.
The prodigal son or daughter is the prototype of her many characters, and Rubina’s characters are often mixed race; she follows some families for several generations to show how multiracial and multiethnic their family histories are. She also enjoys tracing some family traits in her characters, such as particular talents for music or painting. Her protagonists often speak several languages; they smoothly switch between different linguistic, cultural and political environments. Some characters learn to use their disabilities or shortcomings, such as deafness, to their advantage (for example, Aya in Golos or Anna in Leonardo’s Handwriting).
Rubina has also written extensively about the life of immigrants from the former USSR in Israel. Her novel Here Comes Messiah and a book of stories Emigratsia, ten’ u ognya (Emigration, Shade by the Fire) present a kaleidoscopic and diverse range of Russian Jews, Ukrainian Jews, Uzbek Jews, and others. The legend about the Wandering Jew underpins some of these characters’ stories, as they never feel at home either in their new homeland or the one they left behind.
Dina Rubina was born in Tashkent in 1953 to an artist and a history teacher. She graduated from a specialised music school and a conservatoire. At the age of sixteen she was first published in the magazine Yunost, and when she was 24 she published her first book and joined the Soviet Writers Union. In 1984, she moved to Moscow, and before leaving for Israel in 1990, she managed to publish four books of prose.
Since 1993, Dina Rubina has continued to publish short stories and novellas in the Russian magazines Novy Mir, Znamya and The Friendship of Peoples. Between 2003 and today, her books have been published by EKSMO publishing house. The circulation of Rubina's books has long exceeded ten million copies. She is the author of thirteen novels, including two trilogies (The Russian Canary and Napoleon Wagon Train) and many stories and essays. Her books have been translated into 41 languages. Many have become finalists for the Russian Booker and Big Book awards, and some of her novels have won prizes: the Big Book, the Russian Prize and the Goncharov Prize, as well as several Israeli literary prizes. Today she lives near Jerusalem and frequently gives talks and reads her books in audio format.
Dr Natalia (Natasha) Rulyova is Associate Professor in Russian at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests spread across the areas of Russian literature, translation studies, post-Soviet media culture and genre studies.
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