Strolls with Pushkin

by Andrei Sinyavsky, Catharine Nepomnyashchy (Translator), Slava Yastremski (Translator), Michael Naydan (Contribution by), Olha Tytarenko (Contribution by)

Overview

Andrei Sinyavsky wrote Strolls with Pushkin while confined to Dubrovlag, a Soviet labor camp, smuggling the pages out a few at a time to his wife. His irreverent portrait of Pushkin outraged émigrés and Soviet scholars alike, yet his "disrespect" was meant only to rescue Pushkin from the stifling cult of personality that had risen up around him. Anglophone readers who question the longstanding adoration for Pushkin felt by generations of Russians will enjoy tagging along on Sinyavsky's strolls with the great poet, discussing his life, fiction, and famously untranslatable poems. This new edition of Strolls with Pushkin also includes a later essay Sinyavsky wrote on the artist, "Journey to the River Black."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231180818
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/06/2016
Series:	Russian Library
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–1997) was a writer of fiction and nonfiction. After emigrating to France in 1973, he taught for many years as professor of Slavic studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951–2015) was professor of Russian at Barnard College.

Slava I. Yastremski (1952–2015) was professor of Russian at Bucknell University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Strolls with Pushkin
A Journey to the River Black
Remembering Cathy Nepomnyaschchy and Slava Yastremski
Notes
Notes on the Text

Editorial Reviews

In his alter ego as Tertz, Sinyavsky was the David to every institutional Goliath, picking off the monumental cult of the national poet of the Stalin period and the sentimentalized icon of Russia Abroad. His shock tactics were Pushkinian: irreverent wit, conversational tone, thinking outside the box. And guess what? Pushkin was no saint, but his genius is supremely alive and human in this brilliant appreciation. All readers should find in this spirited classic of literary and cultural criticism, vibrantly translated, expertly introduced and annotated, license to our own individual musings with two great writers and writing.

Andrew Kahn

This translation of Sinyavsky's subversive text achieves the impossible, shocking, entertaining, and beguiling us into a freer, more lively appreciation of the liberating power of language.

Cathy Porter

Given its title, Sinyavsky's work is appropriately rambling and easygoing, but also brilliantly iconoclastic about this most iconic of Russian writers.

Michael Dirda

Enhancing this accessible translation of a subtle and complex text, Catharine Nepomnyashchy has written a fine introduction to summarize Pushkin’s life, works and subsequent cult status.

Russia Beyond the Headlines - Phoebe Taplin

Strolls deserves a prominent placer on university library bookshelves and in the syllabi of courses dealing with twentieth-century Russian and European literature.

Slavic & East European Journal - Jerome H. Katsell

In the guise of a spirited, iconoclastic study of the presiding deity of Russian literature, the great Andrei Sinyavsky (writing as his bolder alter ego, Abram Tertz) has composed an ardent and fastidious attack on philistinism in all its forms: literary, psychological, and political.

Susan Sontag

Strolls with Pushkin is an exhilarating tribute to the power of art.

Translation and Literature - Rose France

A playful appreciation of Pushkin’s playfulness.

New York Review of Books - Gary Saul Morson

Comprised of two separate essays written over a quarter century apart—the first smuggled out of a Soviet labor camp in letters to his wife—Sinyavsky’s writing on Pushkin, here collected in Columbia University Press’s new Russian Library, is a reminder that irreverence has its magic.

Public Books - Nicholas Dames

Andrei Sinyavsky/Abram Tertz was one of the most gifted Russian writers of the postwar era. Most of his work is now in print in Russia, but most of the English translations seem to have gone out of print. It will be an excellent thing if Strolls with Pushkin leads us back to him. We need his free and welcoming spirit more than ever.

The Hudson Review - Richard Pevear