Translation as Provocation: Alexander Pushkin's 'Gabrieliad' and the Erotic Utopia of an American Socialist

Ilya Vinitsky

Professor, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Princeton University

ILYA VINITSKY is a Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.  His main fields of expertise are Russian Romanticism and Realism, the history of emotions, and nineteenth- century intellectual and spiritual history.  His books include Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia (Northwestern University Press, 2015), Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism (Toronto University Press, 2009) and A Cultural History of Russian Literature, co-written with Andrew Baruch Wachtel (Polity Press, 2009).  His recent book Transfers: Literary Translation as Interpretation and Provocation (Moscow: Ruthenia, 2022) focuses on liminal and provocative aspects of literary translation and discusses works of Russian, Serbian, French, and American writers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.  He is currently working on a comprehensive study of political and literary activities of Ivan Narodny (Jaan Siboul), a Russian-Estonian expat writer, art critic, and con-man, who lived in America from 1906 until his death in 1953 and was labeled by FBI as “the worst fraud that ever came out of Russia.” In 2019 Vinitsky received a Guggenheim Fellowship for this project.