This is the third edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked.
Today, we trace the legacy of James Joyce to its significant resonance in Russian literature, which José Vergara examines in his cogent and deeply-researched text, All Future Plunges to the Past. By taking the work of five major Russian writers as example, Vergara illuminates the throughline of Joycean ideas and themes, both in their universality and their recontextualization and transformation amidst Soviet and Russian history. In this following interview, Vergara discusses how these writers used Joyce to make sense of their own realities, Russian-language literature in this present moment, and texts from within the prison.
Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Tell me about All Future Plunges to the Past!
José Vergara (JV): My book examines James Joyce’s impact on Russian literature from the mid-1920s, when the first Soviet translations started appearing, through 2020. Of course, that basically means I’m looking at his “influence”—but it goes beyond that. I’m more interested in how, on one hand, Joyce became emblematic of larger trends in Russian attitudes toward Modernism, intertextuality, generational conflicts, artistic identity, and other big issues; and, on the other hand, he took on various forms or manifestations based on how certain Russian writers read him—literally and figuratively. Previous scholars had examined the critical response to Joyce in the Soviet Union and émigré communities, but they paid much less attention to his place in Russian literature itself. So, in All Future Plunges to the Past, I present five case studies of major writers who addressed Joyce directly in their fiction: Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin. The book explores how and why they were drawn to Joyce’s novels and ideas, interpreting them as an alternative path in world literature based on their respective biographical, historical, and cultural contexts. In this reading, Joyce becomes a prism through which to interrogate the question of cultural heritage in Russia, and a means for these writers to better understand themselves and their work. That’s at the core of the book: the question of literary lineages and how artists fashion their own histories through their writing.
KB: How artists fashion their own histories in their writing: could you say a little more about that?
JV: The central through line of my book is fathers and children, primarily sons. It struck me that the aforementioned writers were all, in one way or another, engaging with Joyce’s Shakespeare theory, which Stephen Dedalus explains in episode nine of Ulysses. Basically, he argues that creative artists, such as Shakespeare, become fathers to themselves by leaving behind their works, their lineage, a version of themselves for posterity to—hopefully—admire. At the same time, Stephen suggests that you have to select a literary forefather to supplant the biological. Each of the writers I feature consider this theory and respond to it in their idiosyncratic ways. For instance, Nabokov’s protagonist in The Gift pursues this path, but not to replace his biological father, who disappeared on a scientific expedition. Instead, like Nabokov, he wants to unite the cultural heritage that he lost as a result of the 1917 Revolution, and to bridge those gaps in emigration. All their readings of Joyce are operating on this metatextual level, as they come to terms with who they are in the history of Russian literature.
KB: You focus on Joyce translations, but I wonder if there are any other authors, or clusters of text, whose translation you think had a particularly significant impact on Russian literature?
JV: A curious example is John Dos Passos, who, it seems to me, isn’t particularly widely read these days—either in the U.S. or Russia. I wouldn’t say that he’s had a major influence on Russian literature necessarily (he’s at least not referenced much anymore), but he and Joyce are mentioned in the same breath in a lot of early Soviet criticism; they were seen as emblems of Western Modernism—for good or ill, depending on one’s politics and aesthetics. Later, both Hemingway and Vonnegut had exciting afterlives in the Soviet Union; Sarah Phillips is doing fascinating work on the latter.
KB: Your book of course tells us a lot about the Russian literary tradition, but it also gives us a new perspective on Joyce and his writing. What are some aspects of his work that this project brought to light?
JV: It’s difficult to disentangle at this point, but there’s a range of things: from the specific (for instance, clothing and corporeal motifs) to the more conceptual or thematic (elements of the father-son conflicts). For me the most significant “lesson” was perhaps a reminder of the universality of Joyce’s writing. There’s a lot that’s very specific to Ulysses: Joyce’s personal life, Dublin, Irish history. But despite the alleged impenetrability of his novels and various translation issues, they still made their way into the Russian cultural sphere at these various points. I realize that’s all potentially obvious, but diving into his work this way and seeing how it was transformed in an entirely different tradition defamiliarized it for me; it made me slow down to appreciate how that convoluted language makes us understand life and experience anew, no matter the particular references.
KB: Who are the Russian translators (ie, people translating into the Russian)—of Joyce or any other authors!—whose work you especially admire?
JV: Given the context, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the monumental work of Andrey Rene (a pseudonym referring to André the Giant), who completed the first Russian Finnegans Wake at the end of 2021. Others have published some fragments before, and Rene’s version is, indeed, imperfect, but the fact that he was able to do it at all is worth commending. There’s a three-volume edition without annotations, as well as a seventeen-volume edition with his commentary—all available for free here.
KB: And what about the translators working from Russian into English?
JV: Lisa Hayden and Boris Dralyuk are definitely on my list. I admire the former’s keen sense of narrative voice and style; that’s crucial when translating something such as Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Laurus—a deeply historical, even archaic, novel. Boris is also a brilliant stylist who translates writers such as Isaac Babel and Maxim Osipov and the poet Julia Nemirovskaya. Hearing him speak about his approach to translating is always inspiring.
KB: Something I really admire about your book, and your work in general, is that although you work on the twentieth century, you also bring in voices from the contemporary literature scene.
JV: Moving toward the contemporary has been a natural progression in my research. I started my path in Russian literature fascinated by Dostoevsky, then moved on to Nabokov and Daniil Kharms, but as my Joyce project took off, I became more and more interested in what’s happening today. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s terra incognita. There’s something exciting about being among the first readers of a book or story, about wrestling with the qualities of a text without preconceptions of its worth. We don’t yet know who will someday have streets named after them, so we can explore these works without such baggage. That’s particularly special in the classroom. It cuts both ways, of course, as we can’t rely on our predecessors and colleagues as much as we can when dealing with Tolstoevsky.
As far as the Joyce book goes, the historical story is important, but since we continue to read him today, I thought—why not consider where he fits on shelves now? The Russian literary world is relatively small, which certainly helps getting in touch with writers. So, I set up some interviews to talk to writers about just that. I constructed a mini-oral history—modeled closely on what Svetlana Alexievich does in her books—by piecing together their various statements and putting them into dialogue with one another. This section of the conclusion ended up being my favorite part of the book, because it allowed me to experiment a bit with the form.
KB: This seems like a particularly challenging moment to be a professor of Russian . . . but also, even before now, there has been so much baggage, so many preconceptions brought to Russian literature—whether it’s the shadow cast by some of its giants, or Cold War stereotypes, or ideas of Russian hackers and Putin’s politics. Do you encounter this in the classroom? How do you deal with it?
JV: You’re right—it does come up sometimes, though it’s probably true of any language and culture. I wonder, for instance, what it’s like teaching Italian to students whose only impression of Italian culture might be The Godfather. The reality is much more complicated, of course, but the simple answer is that our classes are an opportunity to break down those preconceptions and unpack that baggage. In the recent push toward the “decolonization” of Slavic Studies, I think many of us have become better attuned to these issues. In my heart of hearts, I’m a Formalist, but in practice, I can’t bring myself to do that, so I try my best to contextualize and nuance what my students and I are reading.
This semester, for instance, I paired Dostoevsky’s Demons with a few readings related to contemporaneous Orthodox nationalism (the author’s own diaries, Nikolai Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe), as well as contemporary pieces on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine, to emphasize how Dostoevsky’s ideas, both good and bad, have stood the test of time. He gave us new ways of reading ourselves, our words, our worldviews, but he also espoused a lot of nonsense. It’s worth presenting all sides of that equation to students.
KB: Can you recommend a few works of Russian literature that people might not be familiar with, but that you think are especially excellent?
JV: Earlier this year I was floored by Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound, an autofictional account of the author’s trip to Siberia to deliver her mother’s ashes. It’ll be out in English translation via Catapult by Elina Alter in 2023. The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin is a brilliant, lesser-read book from the nineteenth century that, alongside The Brothers Karamazov, put an end to the Russian Novel of that era. I’ll also add Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life, whose English translation by Barbara Heldt was brought back into print by Columbia University Press. It’s a rare combination of a book that alternates prose and poetry, and it has led to some of the most dynamic conversations I’ve seen in my classes.
KB: Relatedly, many people are only recently noticing that there are authors like Alisa Ganieva, who are writing in the Russian language, but might not identify as Russian (such as those from Belarus or Ukraine). Who are some of your favorites, and do you see these authors as expanding or changing the tradition?
JV: Svetlana Alexievich is an obvious one, and her identity as the daughter of Belarusian and Ukrainian parents whose only language is Russian speaks directly to your question and underscores the tragedy of what’s happening in the region today. Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees (translated by Boris Dralyuk) is another good example of a Russophone Ukrainian writer. Chinghiz Aitmatov, a Kyrgyz author who wrote in both Kyrgyz and Russian, and translated/rewrote some of his own works, is also fantastic. I strongly recommend The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, which is a distinct blend of what we might call the “Classic Russophone Novel,” the realia of Soviet Central Asia, and a rather unexpected sci-fi plotline.
In general, I do think these authors are offering something new to the tradition, though I’m not sure any of them, or others like them, would necessarily say so explicitly. Still, along the lines of what I suggested earlier, the boundaries of what “Russian literature is” are being redefined or, at least, reconsidered in no small measure thanks to such writers. And we’re all better aware of that process.
What’s special, I suppose, is that their positionality shifts how we might see a Dostoevskian or Gogolian line of influence. They’re engaging with traditions, ideas, and devices (for instance, Ganieva and her approach to polyphony) in their writing that stem from those predecessors, but they’re also revealing new angles on the Russian-speaking world, showing what happens when the Russian language describes places and people other than the usual suspects, and what happens when it comes into contact with other languages. Again, Russophone literature generated by non-ethnic Russians is by no means new, of course, but the growth in scholarly and public interest in it is long overdue.
KB: What are you working on now?
JV: One of my projects, tentatively called “Carceral States: Contemporary Russian Prison Writing,” focuses on Russian prison literature from the last thirty years or so. It looks at the latest in Russian incarceration stories by a range of writers including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Evgeny Vodolazkin, Oleg Navalny, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Ali Feruz, Viktoria Lomasko, and others. I’m interested in exploring how these authors position themselves vis-à-vis their predecessors in the prison-writing tradition and then challenge that tradition’s form, often through both word and image. There’s been great work done on Gulag writing and memoirs, but I’m opting for a wider focus in examining what prisons mean in Russian culture today. For that reason, I’m including texts written by those who have been jailed (as well as those who became writers after their imprisonment), stories that turn their gaze further back—such as fictionalized accounts of Soviet labor camps, and considering fiction, non-fiction, and poetry alongside one another.
Another big project is an annotated digital edition of Sasha Sokolov’s second novel, Between Dog and Dog—the “Encyclopedia of the Dog” (or “Dogopedia” as we’ve been calling it). Sokolov has had a huge influence on the development of contemporary literature, but in many ways he remains a writer’s writer and his three novels—A School for Fools (1976), Between Dog and Wolf (1980), and Palisandriia (1985, translated as Astrophobia)—are somewhat inaccessible to many readers. They’re marked by his idiosyncratic style, which has challenged translators and critics for decades. Case in point: it took thirty-five years to translate Between Dog and Wolf! My hope is to bring a larger readership to the novel, so this project aims to overcome the lack of suitable tools necessary to enter Sokolov’s world by creating a complete and freely accessible bilingual set of annotations that covers everything: linguistic register, style, meta-references, meanings, allusions, all layers of the text. I’m working with some other Sokolov specialists, particularly Martina Napolitano, our amazing digital librarian at Bryn Mawr, and a few students to make this all happen. It should be available by next summer.
KB: You have also done some teaching in prisons in the US. How does that inform this new project?
JV: In many ways. My time teaching in prisons in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania has been transformative in terms of how I approach all classrooms, and my exposure to the realities of the American carceral system over these last ten years has made me more invested in prison issues. It made sense to me that my next project should delve into this topic, too, to consider how writers conceive of and represent this terrible thing in our world.
KB: I wonder: as you read Russian prison literature, and spend time teaching in US prisons, do you notice big differences between the carceral systems, or the cultures more generally?
JV: The biggest and most depressing lesson, I suppose, has been how many similarities there are, as well as how little has changed. Of course, all prisons are unhappy places in their own ways, and I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that conditions in an American prison overlap with those of Russian camps, but both spaces lead to similar outcomes: a distorted sense of time, loss of personal identity, atomized relationships to others, and so on. Shared trends emerge in writing, too: anthropological perspectives, vignettes about other prisoners, blurring of binaries. Additionally, the fact that little has changed, whether in the U.S. or Russia, is brought home every time I teach my course on prison literature and we read Pyotr Kropotkin’s In Russian and French Prisons and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? alongside each other. Despite the many years and miles between them, they’re essentially asking the same questions about the necessity of prisons and their effects on the incarcerated. Clearly, we haven’t found the answers. I always half-joke with my students that they’ll be able to after diving into this literature and these issues in our class, but maybe I should take that possibility more seriously. I hope they will.
José Vergara is Assistant Professor of Russian on the Myra T. Cooley Lectureship at Bryn Mawr College. He is the author of All Future Plunges to the Past, published by Cornell University Press in 2021. He is also the co-editor of Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, published by Amherst College Press in 2022.
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures in English and the Program of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. She is the author of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2021). She is also a translator, most recently, of Zygmunt Bauman’s Culture and Art, and Sketches in the Theory of Culture (Polity, 2021: 2018).
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