Events
Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ expression in the Russian Federation has come more and more firmly under state regulation and prohibition, including the passage of a “gay propaganda” law in 2013. As non-heteronormative people and lives have come to serve the current regime as a wedge issue in Russia’s increasingly polarized political life, LGBTQ+ activists and individuals have turned to forms of expression that have not been completely censored by the state, including poetry, literature, and other forms of artistic expression.
Please join us for a discussion of Russian public culture and LGBTQ+ identities with leading poets, publishers, and scholars. As part of “Your Language My Ear: Russian and American Poetry at Close Quarters” symposium, Dmitry Kuzmin, Galina Rymbu, Stephanie Sandler, and Anastasiya Osipova will discuss the contested place of LGBTQ+ expression in Russian culture with a focus on the continuing power of literature and poetry.
Special thanks to Professor Kevin Platt and the Russian and East European Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania for facilitating this The World Today.
Dmitry Kuzmin is a poet, translator, editor and organizer of literary projects. He has taught at various Russian educational institutions, and in 2014 was visiting professor of Russian poetry at Princeton University. Kuzmin is the founder of the publishing house Argo-Risk (1993), the site Vavilon (1997), and the journal Vozdukh. Due to his opposition to the Russian political regime he has lived since 2014 in Latvia, where he has founded the Literature Without Borders project—an international poetry foundation and residency for translators of poetry. Since 2017, the project has been funding the Poetry Without Borders festival in Riga.
Galina Rymbu is a poetess, literary critic, curatrix, and philosopher from Lviv, Ukraine. She graduated from the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow and received a Masters in socio-political philosophy from the European University at Saint Petersburg. She is the co-foundress and curatrix of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Poetry Prize for young Russian-language poets. She teaches at the St. Petersburg School of New Film and has organized seminars dedicated to feminist literature and the theory of “F-writing.” Her poetry has been translated into English, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Polish, and Latvian, and has been published in the journals Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Vozdukh, Translit, Snob, n+1, Arc Poetry, The White Review, Berlin Quarterly, Music&Literature, Asymptote, and Powder Keg among others. She has published five books of poetry, including one in English translation.
Stephanie Sandler is Ernest E. Monrad Professor and Chair of the Slavic Department at Harvard. She has written about the Pushkin era and about modern myths of Pushkin, including Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford University Press, 2004). She is a co-author of A History of Russian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018), and a co-editor of Ol’ga Sedakova: stikhi, smysly, prochteniia (NLO, 2017), an English-language version of which should appear just before Your Language My Ear commences (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). She has translated several contemporary poets, including Elena Fanailova, Elena Shvarts, Olga Sedakova, Mara Malanova, and Alexandra Petrova. She is someday hoping to complete The Freest Speech in Russia: Poetry After 1989.
Anastasiya Osipova is a scholar, writer, and translator. She is an editor of Cicada Press, a NYC-based imprint that pursues contemporary politically engaged poetic texts. (Cicada’s most recent publication is a bilingual edition of Pavel Arseniev’s poetry entitledReported Speech). She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU and is currently teaching at Gallatin, the School of Individualized Study.
