Friday February 25 at 5PM:
Marijeta Bozovic, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University
"Translating Left After the Second World: The Sparks and Networks of Political Critique”
The Polish journal Krytyka polityczna (Political Critique; in Ukrainian, Політична критика), internationally known and credited by many for resuscitating a post-socialist Polish left, sparked as many as five Ukrainian print editions and was hoped to serve a similar function in Kiev. Plans were underway too for a Russian Политическая критика, based around the St. Petersburg-based poetry journal [Translit] and the art collective Chto Delat, or What Is To Be Done. But the geopolitical events of 2014 (the aftermath of the Maidan revolution; Russia’s annexation of Crimea) brought a rift between Warsaw and St. Petersburg’s left: following bitter accusations of chauvinism on both sides, Chto Delat publicly rejected what they termed Krytyka’s vaguely messianic, imperialist, and ultimately liberal-centrist mission and the collaboration fell through. Yet the story of these Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian sparks and networks, rifts and connections, imperfect and impermanent collectivities is more than just the story of a particular institution. It gives insight into the new left (or lefts, of various shades of red) rising across the former Second World; and it is a story in which translation plays the central role.
MARIJETA BOZOVIC is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, affiliated with Film and Media Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. A specialist in 20th- and 21st-century Russian and East European cultures with broad comparative interests, she is the author of Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and the co-editor (with Matthew Miller) of Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River (Academic Studies Press, 2016) and (with Brian Boyd) of Nabokov Upside Down (Northwestern University Press, 2017). She recently completed work on her second monograph, Avant-Garde Post– : Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union. Bozovic is Co-editor of the journal Russian Literature; Film and Media Editor of Slavic Review; and Associate Editor of ASAP/Journal.
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