We invite you to an evening discussion as part of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025. Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel, translators of Alexei Navalny’s Patriot, will jointamizdatresearcher Yakov Klots and literary critic Lisa Birger in a panel moderated by Polly Jones, the author of Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin, to explore the literature of political prisoners under Putin, its historical context, and the role of translation and new tamizdat publishing in sharing these stories to a global audience.
Alexei Navalny’s memoir Patriot, published after his death in an Arctic prison camp last February, recounts his childhood and family life, path into politics to become the leader of Russia’s opposition, and his 2021 return to Russia after a near-fatal poisoning, which led to his immediate arrest. The second part of the book is his prison diary detailing daily life, comments on world events, and, towards the end, philosophical and religious reflections on life. The diary ends abruptly on 17 January, exactly three years after Navalny’s return; he was killed less than a month later.
Patriot joins a long tradition of political prisoner literature rooted in Gulag writing of the Soviet period, now revived amid Putin’s crackdown on freedom of expression. This growing body of works includes memoirs like Navalny’s, exposés like Троян. ГУЛАГ нашего времени by whistleblower Sergei Savelyev, courtroom speech collections like Непоследние слова, and Питомцы, a 'prison fairytale' by theatre director Evgenia Berkovich, whose work also contributes to a new wave of women’s prison literature.
With censorship reaching publishers and bookshops in Russia, political prisoners and other dissenting voices are finding readers through publishers-in-exile and diaspora bookshops. Translation also helps resist censorship and reach even wider audiences. Patriot was translated into eleven languages and released worldwide on the same day – a major international effort. Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel, whose translation of Patriot has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize, will reflect on their work as translators of this landmark text, while Yakov Klots will talk about historical prison narratives and their publication through tamizdat, and Lisa Birger will explore women prisoners’ voices.
You can read our interview with Arch Tait about the process and challenges of translating Patriothere.
Speakers
Lisa Birger
Lisa Birger is a literary critic, translator and journalist. She graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of the Russian State University for the Humanities, specialising in Russian and German philology. She has written for Афиша, Ведомости, Медуза, Forbes, and ran a weekly book column for КоммерсантЪ Weekend for five years. Lisa moved to Istanbul in 2012. She runs courses in the Creative Writing School and since January 2024 she has been the curator of Полторы комнаты bookshop in Istanbul.
Stephen Dalziel
Stephen Dalziel has a degree in Russian Studies from the University of Leeds and spent a year at Kyiv State University in the USSR. He worked at the Soviet Studies Research Centre at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, before spending 16 years at the BBC World Service, broadcasting about the USSR, Russia and Ukraine. After leaving the BBC Stephen spent five years as Executive Director of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce. Stephen’s first book, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, was published in 1993, and his translations from Russian to English include Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of the Russian Leviathan (winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2020) andA War Made in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s How Do You Slay a Dragon?, and his translation with Arch Tait of Alexei Navalny’s Patriot.
Polly Jones
Polly Jones is Professor of Russian and Schrecker-Barbour Fellow at University College, Oxford, and Deputy Chair of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. She is the author and editor of several books on Soviet cultural history and politics, including Revolution Rekindled. The Writers and Readers of Late Soviet Biography and Myth(OUP, 2019), Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70(Yale, 2013), and Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin(Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Professor Jones appears regularly on radio and TV to talk about Russian culture and history, and was consultant to Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin.
Yasha Klots
Yasha Klots is an associate professor of Russian literature at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests are book history, Russian and East European émigré literature and culture, urbanism, and Gulag narratives (particularly Varlam Shalamov). He is the author of several books, includingTamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era(Cornell UP, 2023), and the director of theTamizdat Project, a public scholarship and charity initiative for the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
Arch Tait
Arch Tait has a PhD in Russian literature from Cambridge University. He began translating for Soviet Literature magazine in 1992 and for some years was UK editor of the Glas New Russian Writing translation series. He has translated dozens of books from Russian as well as short stories and essays by many of today’s leading Russian-speaking writers. His translations include Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia(winner of the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010), Mikhail Gorbachev’s The New Russia, Svetlana Alexievich’sChernobyl Prayer, co-translated with Anna Gunin, Kira Yarmysh’s The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3, and Patriot, co-translated with Stephen Dalziel. An overview of Tait’s translations can be found on his website www.russianwriting.com
