Join us for a conversation between Professor Mikhail Iampolski, author of The Memory of Tiresias. Intertextuality in Film (1993), and poet Maria Stepanova, author of the critically acclaimed In Memory of Memory (2017), which has been translated into more than 20 languages. Long-time friends, they will talk about Russian culture in the country, abroad, and in exile, as well as related thorny issues of writing in Russian outside of Russia.

How does memory and nostalgia form the image of the place lost, yet lingering in mind? How is trauma being processed through recurring images in popular culture? How does our re-assessment of the past influence the perception and anticipation of the future? Both Iampolski and Stepanova have spent considerable time thinking about the issues of political memory and personal identity.

This event will be an open conversation with the audience. 

Before moving to the United States, Mikhail Iampolski lived and worked in Moscow at the Institute of Cinematography and the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a Doctor of Art History. In 1991, he was invited to the Getty Institute in Los Angeles for a year, and then moved to New York, where he became a professor of comparative literature and Russian studies at New York University. He is the author of many books and articles on cinematography, as well as the history and theory of culture. Visuality occupies a special place in his research, and in recent years, the problem of form.

Maria Stepanova is a renowned poet, essayist, and journalist, with ten poetry collections and three books of essays to her name. Stepanova’s work has earned numerous Russian and international honours, including the Andrei Bely Prize and the Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. Her novel In Memory of Memory won the Bolshaya Kniga Award in 2018 and was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, a prestigious prize awarded in the field of literature in English. In 2021, Bloodaxe published her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals in Sasha Dugdale’s translation, selected as the Poetry Book Society Translation Choice in Spring 2021. Her most recent book, Disappearing Act, will be published in English later this year by Fitzcarraldo Editions, in a translation by Sasha Dugdale.

Swedenborg Hall Barter Street London WC1A 2TH