Please Note: This event will be held in Russian. All discussion, Q&A, and materials will be in Russian only and, on this occasion, no translation will be provided.

We invite you to an evening talk with Ksenia Golubovich, whose new book brings together two pieces of autobiographical prose set at opposite poles of her personal history: the author’s relationships with her English stepfather and her Serbian father serve as starting points for an artistic exploration of family, memory and cultural belonging. Through the poetry of modernists – from Auden to Yeats – these personal stories become a quest for identity unfolding between London, 1990s Moscow and Belgrade. Moving across eras and geographies, the book’s protagonist tries to locate her own place in a world where individual destinies, national codes and cultural traditions are tightly interwoven.

We will discuss how family histories become a way of understanding the self and one’s culture; how modernist poetry finds its way into prose; and why the division of the world into the “masculine” and “feminine” today exceeds familiar stereotypes. The conversation will also touch on the relationship between personal fate and historical experience, and on how themes of kinship and rupture create a dialogue between the Russian and British cultures. In addition, we’ll look at the genre nature of autobiographical writing and how it blends fiction and documentary, going beyond the conventional novel. Are such works becoming a new form of storytelling, gradually displacing older, outdated genres?

Ksenia Golubovich is a writer, literary analyst, translator and cultural scholar. She graduated from the Romance-Germanic Department of Moscow State University and completed an internship at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in Philology, specialising in Shakespeare studies and English Modernism. She wrote her dissertation on the poetry of W.B. Yeats, and has translated poetry and prose by Yeats, Bruce Chatwin, Charles Sanders Piers, and Dylan Thomas. She is the author of studies on the works of Olga Sedakova (the book Postmodernism in Paradise, 2022) and Merab Mamardashvili (Encounters in an Unknown Homeland, 2021). From 2016 to 2020, she served as the chair of the A.M. Pyatigorsky Prize for  Philosophical Essay. She is also the creator of courses on "Literature and Contemporary Art" and "Cinema and Contemporary Art." Ksenia is the author of a trilogy dedicated to the end of the 20th century: Wishes Granted, Serbian Parables, and The Russian Daughter of an English Writer.

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