Dislocation: Russophone Poetry Against the War - Julia Nemirovskaya

We are delighted that Julia Nemirovskaya, who is a well-known and deeply appreciated Russian poet, prose-writer and literary scholar, has agreed to speak to the Society. Julia has been collecting protest poems by a wide range of a Russophone authors about the war in Ukraine since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.  In her talk Julia Nemirovskaya will explore the phenomenon of the current abundance of anti-war poetry composed by Russophone authors in Ukraine, Russia and other parts of the former USSR, as well as in the diaspora. She will mention some of the themes that have emerged in this poetry and the evolution of poetic styles that can be discerned. Julia will discuss the value and significance of this great outburst of poetic creativity, as reflected in the two anthologies she has published with a group of translators: Disbelief (Smokestack Books, 2022) and Dislocation (Slavica, 2024).

After this overview of recent anti-war poetry, Julia will provide an analysis of several individual poems, one or two of which she will read in Russian and English translation. Josephine von Zitzewitz will read a couple of her own translations and briefly share her own perspective on Julia’s work collecting anti-war poetry. Following this, Julia will be keen to discuss with us in the Q&A both the poetry and the themes addressed in her talk.

Dislocation

Julia Nemirovskaya is a poet, prose writer and literary scholar. She graduated from the Department of Philology at Moscow State University. The dissertation which she defended there focused on the structure of Pushkin’s late poems in comparison with the poems of Évariste de Parny.  As one of the “New Wave Poets” of the 1980s–90s, Julia was a member of the renowned Kovaldzhi seminar and the Moscow Poetry Club. She moved to Sweden in 1988 and since 1991 has lived in the USA. She currently teaches Russian culture and literature at the University of Oregon, where she especially enjoys running a course called “Russian through Theatre”.

Julia has published four collections of verse and short stories, a novel and a book on Russian cultural history, Inside the Russian Soul: An Historical Survey of Russian Cultural Patterns (McGraw-Hill, 1997, 2001). With a group of translators, she has also published two anthologies of ant-war poetry, Disbelief (Smokestack Books, 2022) and (co-edited with A. Krushelnitskaya) Dislocation (Slavica Publishers, 2024). Her work has appeared in Asymptote, GLAS, Literary Review, Znamya, LRS-Lettres Russes, Bonniers Litterära Magasin and elsewhere, and has been translated into several European languages. Her 26 plays have been staged in theatres across Russia, the USA, Germany and France.

Josephine von Zitzewitz is an academic and translator. She is the author of two academic monographs on late Soviet samizdat literature and numerous articles on late 20th-century and contemporary Russian poetry. Her translations of Russian-language poetry have appeared in journals in the US and UK and in several anthologies. She is a contributor to the Dislocation (bilingual) anthology of anti-war poetry.