We are as disappointed as you are that the ash cloud stopped our Russian authors from making it to the UK for our SLOVO festival. However, the festival has not been cancelled, merely postponed. We are working hard to bring the events to London at a later date, so keep a close eye on our website! In the meantime, Academia Rossica is delighted to support The East End Film Festival (22 April – Friday 30) in their focus on new Russian cinema.

SLOVO events have been postponed until later notice due to flights cancellation. Please follow further announcements and join us at our events.

Izbavi Bog i nas ot etakikh sudei

A few weeks ago something strange happened. Someone sent me, through the post, ten million printed words – I’ll repeat that, in case you weren’t concentrating: ten million words – nearly half of them in a difficult foreign language. I was told to get reading them.

The first day ended with an evening with Dmitry Bykov and Bridget Kendall at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly. Bykov entertained the large audience with, along with everything else, a joke. It went like this: “At birth you get a label put on your arm, after death, it’s put on your foot. If someone gets the same number both times, they win a prize – a pressure cooker.”

March 23, 7.30pm
£12-£24
Following her sold-out Brahms recital last season, when she returned to the London concert platform after many years’ absence, Russian pianist Nelly Akopian-Tamarina makes a return to Wigmore Hall with an atmospheric programme of middle-European mood scenes. Blocked by official censorship in Russia from giving public concerts for more than a decade, Moscow-born Nelly Akopian-Tamarina has revisited Russia in recent years to give concerts at the Bolshoi Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire and also in Kiev.

Irina Polyanskaya (1952-2004) was the most autobiographical of recent Russian writers, as well as one of the most accomplished. Repelled by the impersonality of history as studied in schools or described in books, she focussed instead on the human past of her family and on family life in general, her view of which was anything but sentimenal. Polyanskaya was born in 1953, and spent her early years in the ‘Zone' in the Urals, where her convict father was put to work as a scientist. She trained as an actress, studied music, and later attended the Literary Institue in Moscow. For many years, her literary output was largely confined to the genre of the short story, but her last years (before illness cut short her life) brought the publication of several longer works, including The Passing of the Shade (Prokhozhdenie teni, 1997) and The Reading Water (Chitayushchaya voda, 2001). The thread of music runs through the first; cinematic motifs dominate the second.

by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Ignat Avsey
One World Classics, 2008, pp. 391
Oscar Wilde claimed that Humiliated and Insulted is not "at all inferior to the other great masterpieces" and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma and, above all, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships.

by Mikhail Bulgakov
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Yale University Press, 2008, pp.310
White Guard, Mikhail Bulgakov’s semi-autobiographical first novel, revolves around a Ukrainian family in their home city of Kiev in 1918. Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka Turbin, adult siblings who have just lost their mother, find themselves plunged into the chaotic civil war that erupted in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution.

Christopher MacLehose was Literary Editor of the Scotsman and subsequently Editorial Director at Chatto & Windus. After four years as Editor-in-Chief at William Collins, he became the Publisher at the Harvill Press, in which role he spent the next 22 years until after 7 years of independence the Press was bought by Random House. In that time Harvill became the leading translation house in Britain, publishing some of the outstanding contemporary European writers (Saramago, Sebald, Perec, Halldór Laxness, Magris, Enquist, Marías, Høeg; along with a list of crime writers in translation, among them Mankell, Arnaldur Indridason, Vargas); as also a list of American authors which included Ray Carver, Richard Ford and Peter Matthiessen.

Novelist and broadcaster. He was born in Moscow in 1945. He studied art and later geometrical topology at Moscow University. He emigrated in 1975 and worked as a theatre director for a student theatre group in Jerusalem. Since 1976 he has lived and worked in London. He regularly contributes to BBC Radio, the Times Literary Supplement and to other periodicals. He is editor and presenter of West End, a weekly radio show for the BBC Russian Service. Zinovy's seven novels have been translated into a number of European languages. His novel The Mushroom Picker was made into a film for BBC Television in 1994. His novel Russian Service, as well as a number of his short stories, were adapted for BBC Radio 3 and for Radio France. During the 1990s three of his novels in Russian were nominated for the Russian Booker in Moscow. Zinik's dramatic farce Here Comes the Tiger, set to music by Gerard McBurney, was first performed by The Gogmagogs at the London City Festival in 1999. His radio documentary on Berlin, After the Wall, (with Claudia Sinnig) was awarded the Bronze Medal at the New York International Radio Festival in 2001. His documentary radio drama My Father's Leg was broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in 2003. Zinik's recent collection of short stories Mind the Doors was published in 2002 by Context Books, New York. Zinovy is a member of The Colony Room Club in Soho.

Poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator Elaine Feinstein worked variously as an editor for Cambridge University Press, as Lecturer in English at Bishop's Stortford Training College, and as a journalist. She contributes to many periodicals, including the Times Literary Supplement. Elaine Feinstein's first volume of poetry, In a Green Eye, was published in 1966. Her later work has been influenced by the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, a poet whose work she has translated from the Russian. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1990. Her book, Anna of all the Russias: The Life of a Poet under Stalin (2005), is a biography of Anna Akhmatova. Elaine Feinstein is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was elected on to the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.

Imperial Russian Ballet
Oranienbaum: Chinoiserie a la Russe
A la Russe: the Russian art of performance through the 18th and 19th centuries is celebrated in this issue, dedicated to Russia’s most famous ballets and to Catherine the Great’s personal Dacha – Oranienbaum.

Rumiantsev’s Arc – Library of a Nation
If the book lies at the heart of Russian culture, then the most vital, life-preserving institution in Russian culture is the library. This issue of ROSSICA focuses on the remarkable history and collections of Russia’s largest library: originally called the Rumiantsev Museum, later the Lenin Library (Leninka) it is now the Russian State Library.

Imperial Russian Ballet
Oranienbaum: Chinoiserie a la Russe
A la Russe: the Russian art of performance through the 18th and 19th centuries is celebrated in this issue, dedicated to Russia’s most famous ballets and to Catherine the Great’s personal Dacha – Oranienbaum.

Rumiantsev’s Arc – Library of a Nation
If the book lies at the heart of Russian culture, then the most vital, life-preserving institution in Russian culture is the library. This issue of ROSSICA focuses on the remarkable history and collections of Russia’s largest library: originally called the Rumiantsev Museum, later the Lenin Library (Leninka) it is now the Russian State Library.

Zinovy Zinik is a Moscow-born novelist and broadcaster. He studied art and later geometrical topology at Moscow University. He emigrated in 1975 and worked as a theatre director for a student theatre group in Jerusalem. Since 1976 he has lived and worked in London. He regularly contributes to BBC Radio, the Times Literary Supplement and other periodicals. He is the editor and presenter of West End, a weekly radio show for the BBC Russian Service. Zinovy's nine books of fiction have been translated into a number of European languages. Of his recent books, Zinik's collection of short stories in English Mind the Doors was published in 2002 by Context Books, New York.

Poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator Elaine Feinstein worked variously as an editor for Cambridge University Press, as Lecturer in English at Bishop's Stortford Training College, and as a journalist. She contributes to many periodicals, including the Times Literary Supplement. Elaine Feinstein's first volume of poetry, In a Green Eye, was published in 1966. Her later work has been influenced by the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, a poet whose work she has translated from the Russian. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1990.