Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

Russian "realism"; literature and medicine; translation theory; the Russian and English modernist short story; influence and adaptation; metafiction

Dissertation: “Remains to be Seen: The Afterlife of Russian Realism”

Since the completion of my dissertation—which focused on the wasting bodies and exposed corpses of Russian realism and their afterlives in Western Europe—I have been repeatedly tempted to explore the nexus between translation/adaptation and medicine. My first article, “Literary Disorders and Translation Treatment: Curing Chekhov’s ‘The Black Monk,’” sparked my fascination with the ways that translation—broadly conceived—relies on the rhetoric and symbolic economy of pathology, diagnosis, healing, and reanimation. Since then, projects about flies drowning in ink (“How is the Fly Fallen, Fallen: The Sacrificed Insects of Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield”), brain fever (“Between Physiology and Fiction: Brain Fever in The Brothers Karamazov and its English Afterlife,” co-authored with Jacob Emery) and unburied bodies (“Constance Garnett and the English Afterlife of Dostoevsky’s Corpses”) are keeping me busy compiling the ways that translators, disciples, and plagiarists make creative appropriation synonymous with diagnosis.

My commitment to intertextuality and translation extends beyond my current literature-and-medicine mania and informs all aspects of my research. Having been trained in a comparative literature department, I am always eager to explore the tensions that arise when stories are transmitted to new readers and cultures. I am at the beginning stages of a larger project that considers some of the major nineteenth-century Russian realists not in translation but as translators themselves. My hope for this book-length project will be not only to unearth the translation theories that animated the literary scene in fin-de-siècle Russia, but also to explore how authors use their fiction, and translations, to reflect metafictionally upon their own roles in the importation, mediation, and appropriation of other national literatures.

Topics of interest that may insinuate themselves into future work include: pregnancy and procreation in literature and film; the figure of the sun at noon and its attendant narrative stasis; Nabokov’s lectures; and bad pathographies of Chekhov and a host of other Russian writers.

 

“‘May Russia Find her Thoughts Faithfully Translated’: E. M. de Vogüé’s Importation of Russian Literature into France,” in Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context. Open Book Publishers, 2023.

“Tolstoy’s ‘Karma’”. Tolstoy Studies Journal, XXXII, 2020.

“Remains to be Seen: Constance Garnett and the English Afterlife of Dostoevsky’s Corpses,” The Russian Review, 79.4, October 2020.

“Between Physiology and Fiction: Brain Fever in The Brothers Karamazov and its English Afterlife,” co-authored with Jacob Emery, PMLA, 135.5, October 2020.

“How is the Fly Fallen, Fallen: The Sacrificed Insects of Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield.” The Slavic East European Journal, 63.1, Spring 2019.

“The Translation’s Invisibility”: An Introductory Essay to Nabokov’s “Art of Translation” Lecture. The Nabokovian (The International Vladimir Nabokov Society).

“Winged Things: Chekhov’s Letter to Suvorin.” Chekhov’s Letters, edited by Carol Apollonio and Radislav Lapushin, Lexington Books, 268-270, 2018.

“Literary Disorders and Translation Treatment: Curing Chekhov’s ‘The Black Monk.’” Literature and Medicine 31, no.2 (Fall 2013): 256-76.