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Russian-Language War Poetry: Three Years Later
Tue 4 March 20254 Mar 2025 
06:3008:00 PM
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Description

Julia Nemirovskaya and Josephine von Zitzewitz in Conversation with Jessy Kaner, with an introduction by Robert Chandler 

Poetry is a medium that responds quickly and concisely to current events. It fulfils many roles – outcry, therapy, manifesto, witness account, act of resistance, political statement, philosophical meditation and more. Russia’s war against Ukraine has triggered an outpouring of Russian-language anti-war poetry by recent and long-term expatriates from Russia and the post-Soviet space, poets still in the Russian Federation, and Ukrainians who write in Russian. This outpouring may be unprecedented in the history of world literature, in the context of reactions to ongoing wars of empire and colonialism.

Three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the variety of anti-war texts is now greater than ever and has been chronicled in many online and print publications. This event will focus on the bilingual volumes Disbelief and Dislocation. The poems in these volumes are sourced from the Kopilka project, a growing archive of current anti-war poetry founded in February 2022.

Julia Nemirovskaya, the editor of both Disbelief and Dislocation and founder of the Kopilka project, and Josephine von Zitzewitz, a member of the Kopilka translation team and one of its chroniclers, will reflect on literature as a response to trauma, translation as both scholarly and political practice, and poetry as a means of resistance and a way to sustain hope. The event will include a poetry reading and a Q&A session.

The conversation will be moderated by BBC World Service journalist Jessy Kaner and introduced by poet and translator Robert Chandler

This is a Pushkin Club event, and all are welcome.

Speakers
Julia Nemirovskaya

Julia Nemirovskaya is a Moscow-born poet and author and now teaches at the University of Oregon. She has published four collections of verse and short stories, a novel and a book on Russian cultural history, Inside the Russian Soul: An Historical Survey of Russian Cultural Patterns (McGraw-Hill, 1997, 2001). With a group of translators, she has published two anthologies of anti-war poetry, Disbelief (Smokestack Books, 2023, co-edited with A. Krushelnitskaya) and Dislocation (Slavica Publishers, 2024). Her work has appeared in Asymptote, GLAS, Literary Review, Znamya, LRS-Lettres Russes, Bonniers Litterära Magasin and elsewhere, and has been translated into several European languages. Her 26 plays have been staged in theatres across Russia, the USA, Germany and France.

 

Josephine von Zitzewitz

Josephine von Zitzewitz is an academic and translator. She is the author of two academic monographs on late Soviet samizdat literature, and most recently numerous articles on late 20th-century and contemporary Russian poetry. Her translations of Russian-language poetry have appeared in journals in the US and UK and in several anthologies. She co-edited the “Young Russophonia” issue of Words without Borders and is a contributor to Dislocation, the bilingual anthology of Russophone anti-war poetry.

 

Location

5a Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2TA

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