6.30pm, Thursday 25 November, Hendon Library
Literary publisher, translator, poet and novelist Alessandro Gallenzi will be discussing the challenges of translating modern Russian fiction. He will also address why there is a need for new translations of Russian classics, and talk about publishing Tolstoy’s works and most recently The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy, 100 years after the death of Tolstoy.

Diaghilev fever is taking London by storm. The V&A's major exhibition 'Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929' reveals Diaghilev's enduring influence on 20th-century art, design and fashion. The V&A is also holding a number of other Diaghilev themed events, including 'The Music of Diaghilev with the Philharmonia Orchestra' and 'Rephrasing the Ballets Russes', in collaboration with the English National Ballet. And the perfect accompaniment to this year's season of Diaghilev events is Sjeng Scheijen's new biography of the arguably the greatest (and most controversial) impresario of all time.

30 September – 25 October
The Royal Ballet perform John Cranko's Onegin at the Royal Opera House. Stage designs and music taken from Tchaikovsky in a specially created score bring the world of imperial Russia vividly alive to complete a ballet of colour, drama, beauty and passion.

Winner of the Rossica Young Translators Award 2010 announced! On 21 April the winner of the RYTA was announced by judges Oliver Ready and Robert Chandler at a special ceremony in the PEN Literary Café at the London Book Fair. The winner is: Leo Shtutin for his translation of an extract from Mikhail Shishkin's novel Letter-Book (Письмовник) Leo Shtutin receives £500 and an invitation from Academia Rossica to travel to Moscow to take part in a Translators' Congress in September 2010. The Congress will be a high-profile event which will take place during the International Moscow Book Fair and in which more 100 translators of Russian literature will take part.

The interesting and informative Books From Russia catalogue is now available to download from our website. With information about our programmes and guests for SLOVO Festival and London Book Fair, and about Russia becoming the Market Focus for the 2011 LBF, this is the perfect accompaniment to these events. Please contact us for any more information and we look forward to seeing you there.

A historian of medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov (b. 1952) is the son of a geneticist who turned to writing prose, for children and adults, in the 1960s. Sharov himself began writing fiction in the late 1970s, but it was not until the 1990s that his highly unusual historiosophical novels came before the public gaze. In so doing, they caused genuine acrimony and controversy among influential editors of the literary journals (especially Novyi mir).

A historian of medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov (b. 1952) is the son of a geneticist who turned to writing prose, for children and adults, in the 1960s. Sharov himself began writing fiction in the late 1970s, but it was not until the 1990s that his highly unusual historiosophical novels came before the public gaze.

Vladimir Grigoriev is Deputy Head of the Russian Federal Agency for the Press and Mass Communications and he is a tireless campaigner and champion of Russian literature and culture at all the world's major book fairs: he has famously said, ‘Russian literature should know no boundaries.'

3rd RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL 30 October – 8 November 2009 Apollo Piccadilly, London T: 0871 220 6000 Academia Rossica is proud to present 10 UK premieres of award-winning Russian films produced in. All films with English subtitles. Programme director: Andrey Plakhov, President of FIPRESCI. The festival opens on 30 October with a new adaptation of Anna Karenina by one of Russia’s most defiant film directors, Sergei Soloviev. The film took 14 years to make and it is part of Soloviev’s trilogy ASSA (1987) – ASSA-2 (2009) – Anna Karenina (2009). Full programme of the Festival:

Red Pyramid
Russian Literature from the 21st Century
In this literary edition of ROSSICA, we are delighted to present the first English translations of new works by nine leading Russian writers. ROSSICA 19 introduces their work through extracts from six novels, recently published in Russia, and three short stories especially written for this anthology.

26 May
Moscow
On the 26th of May, the names of the writers shortlisted for the 'Big Book' literary prize were announced. 13 authors have been shortlisted. Two of the shortlisted books were entered into the competition as manuscripts: Mariam Petrosyan's 'The House Where'and Andrei Baldin's 'The Extension of the Full Stop'.

When Academia Rossica approached me to serve on the jury for their translation prize, I was excited and intrigued. What would the field be like, how many entries would there be, were there still publishers around in the West willing to produce translations of serious Russian works? The classics apart, was there more to Russian literature for English-speaking people than penguins and historical detectives? My caricature of the average Western reader's view of Russian literature today can perhaps be excused in part by my own education.

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.

3rd RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL 30 October – 8 November 2009 Apollo Piccadilly, London T: 0871 220 6000 Academia Rossica is proud to present 10 UK premieres of award-winning Russian films produced in. All films with English subtitles. Programme director: Andrey Plakhov, President of FIPRESCI. The festival opens on 30 October with a new adaptation of Anna Karenina by one of Russia’s most defiant film directors, Sergei Soloviev. The film took 14 years to make and it is part of Soloviev’s trilogy ASSA (1987) – ASSA-2 (2009) – Anna Karenina (2009). Full programme of the Festival:

I see Russia’s future in the brightest of hues. Admittedly, this sort of statement does not befit a dystopian writer like me, who is supposed to make dire predictions, though for some what I am going to tell you will sound as bad as an anti-utopia (while I see it as an almost ideal outcome).

I see Russia’s future in the brightest of hues. Admittedly, this sort of statement does not befit a dystopian writer like me, who is supposed to make dire predictions, though for some what I am going to tell you will sound as bad as an anti-utopia (while I see it as an almost ideal outcome).

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.”

By Matthew Bown
MOVIE SPOILER ALERT. Yesterday I viewed the film Simple Things (Простые Вещи) by director/scriptwriter Alexei Popogrebsky at the Russian film festival in London. It's a good piece of kitchen-sink naturalism, which moves at a more leisurely pace than I think any US or UK movie would attempt.

By Larushka Ivan-Zadeh
The second Russian Film Festival shows there's refreshingly more to Russians on screen than the cartoon mafioskis of RocknRolla et al.

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.

Mikhail Shishkin was born in 1961 and grew up in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute where he trained as a teacher. Following his graduation in 1982, Shishkin worked as a journalist at ‘Rovesnik’ and then, between 1985 and 1995, as a teacher of English and German. In 1995 he moved to Switzerland and he lives in Zurich to this day. Buoyed by Shishkin’s sophisticated language and phrases of unique melody, predictable comparisons have been made to that other writer of extraordinary linguistic versatility, Vladimir Nabokov. Though he understands himself as within a tradition of Russian writers in exile, for Shishkin, the question ‘to return or not to return to Russia’ simply does not exist. He asserts that ‘for a better understanding of the self one should live everywhere’.

Vladimir Makanin was born in 1937 in Orsk, a city which straddles the Ural River. Makanin himself recalls how every morning he would cross from the ‘European' side where he lived, into Asia, to go to school, before returning back to Europe in the evening. Makanin's love of chess led him to enter Moscow State University to study Mathematics - and for six years after that he was a mathematician working in a laboratory of the Dzherzhinsky Military Academy. He has lived in Moscow ever since.

A historian of medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov (b. 1952) is the son of a geneticist who turned to writing prose, for children and adults, in the 1960s. Sharov himself began writing fiction in the late 1970s, but it was not until the 1990s that his highly unusual historiosophical novels came before the public gaze. In so doing, they caused genuine acrimony and controversy among influential editors of the literary journals (especially Novyi mir). Many were appalled both by Sharov's literary method and by his exploration through fiction of the mythological and religious substrata of Russian (and especially Revolutionary) history and thought - in particular, of its Utopian, eschatological, and messianic tendencies. Undeterred, Sharov has continued in his distinctive groove, writing, in the opinion of many critics (some of whom now consider him a ‘living classic') one and the same book: an ongoing commentary on philosophy, history, and the sacred texts. In these complex meditations, the views of the author himself remain elusive.

Dmitry Novikov, born in 1966, began writing prose in his early thirties, after studying medicine at university and then entering business. He lives in Petrozavodsk, Karelia. In 2007 he received the New Pushkin Prize for his third book of stories, Longing (Vozhdelenie, 2005, 320pp). ‘The Toads of Revenge and Conscience', which reflects the author's love of the North, and especially the White Sea, is taken from this collection.

Despite the numerous linguistic obstacles thrown up by his novels, especially in their opening sections, Aleksei Ivanov has enjoyed phenomenal popular and critical success in the past five years. In his two breakthrough ‘historical' novels of adventure and fantasy, Heart of the Taiga (Serdtse Parmy, 2003) and Gold of the Rebellion, or Down the River of Gorges (Zoloto bunta, ili vniz po reke tesnin, 2005), Ivanov gives full expression to his fascination with local lore and its relation to Russian history. By contrast, The Geographer who Drank Away his Globe (Geograf globus propil, 2003) and Cheap Porn (the English title given by Ivanov's agents to the untranslatable Bluda i MUDO, 2007) have belied Ivanov's reputation as the kraeved (local historian) from Perm.

Mikhail Shishkin was born in 1961 and grew up in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute where he trained as a teacher. Following his graduation in 1982, Shishkin worked as a journalist at ‘Rovesnik’ and then, between 1985 and 1995, as a teacher of English and German. In 1995 he moved to Switzerland and he lives in Zurich to this day. Buoyed by Shishkin’s sophisticated language and phrases of unique melody, predictable comparisons have been made to that other writer of extraordinary linguistic versatility, Vladimir Nabokov. Though he understands himself as within a tradition of Russian writers in exile, for Shishkin, the question ‘to return or not to return to Russia’ simply does not exist. He asserts that ‘for a better understanding of the self one should live everywhere’.

Vladimir Makanin was born in 1937 in Orsk, a city which straddles the Ural River. Makanin himself recalls how every morning he would cross from the ‘European' side where he lived, into Asia, to go to school, before returning back to Europe in the evening. Makanin's love of chess led him to enter Moscow State University to study Mathematics - and for six years after that he was a mathematician working in a laboratory of the Dzherzhinsky Military Academy. He has lived in Moscow ever since.

by Dmitry Golynko
Eugene Ostashevsky & Rebecca Bella with Simona Schneider
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008, pp.143
Dmitry Golynko’s first English-language release, As It Turned Out, features both earlier and more current poetry, drawing on the author’s three books as well as internet and unpublished materials. The translators collaborated with the editor and the author to achieve the closest possible correspondence to the original Russian texts, all of which appear on facing pages.

by Various
Translated by Peter Oram
Arc Publications, 2008, pp.132
An anthology of poems by the major literary figures in Russia, writing to, about, or in memory of other poets, following a tradition which started in the early years of the twentieth century and continued through the subsequent decades, more or less until the millennium.

by Larissa Miller
Translated by Richard McKane
Arc Publications, 2008, pp.132
Larissa Miller is one of Russia's most highly-regarded writers - novelist, essayist and poet - and this selection from her collection "Between the Cloud and the Pit" (1999) spans her poetic output from the 1960s to the millennium. "Guests of Eternity" is a presentation, in chronological order, of poems written (but not published) in the three decades preceding glasnost' as well as the final decade of the twentieth century.

by Sergei Lukyanenko
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
William Heinemann of The Random House Group, 2007, pp. 440
In Twilight Watch, the Others face their greatest threat yet. A renegade Other, his identity as yet unknown, has absconded with a fabled spell-book of untold power and appears bent on attacking the entire earth. Now forces of the Light and the Dark - the Night Watch and the Day Watch - must cooperate to stop him.

by Sergei Lukyanenko
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
William Heinemann of The Random House Group, 2008, pp. 394
While on holiday in Scotland, visiting a macabre tourist attraction, “The Dungeons of Edinburgh,” a young Russian tourist is murdered. As the police grapple with the fact that the cause of the young man’s death was a massive loss of blood, the Watches are immediately aware that there is a renegade vampire on the loose.

by Rafael Grugman
Translated by Geoffrey Carlson
Liberty Publishing House, 2008, pp.239
The scene is the twenty-third century. At the heart of the novel is a love story between a man and a woman who are forced to hide their feelings and pass as homosexuals. Nontraditional Love describes a homosexual world in which heterosexual marriages are forbidden. World history and the classics of world literature Tolstoy, Shakespeare... have been falsified in order to support the ideology of this opposite world.

by Victor Pelevin
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
Faber and Faber, 2008, pp.333
Described as "the Zen Buddhist Will Self of the former Evil Empire", Victor Pelevin is a star of contemporary Russian literature. The Sacred Book Of The Werewolf is an extraordinarily accomplished piece of contemporary writing that mashes up an assortment of genres: horror, humour, romance, fantasy, satire and post-modern self-reflexivity and sampling. The result is something that has to be classified as "high" literature, if only because of its entanglings in and borrowings from the work of Vladimir Nabokov and its deadly serious critique of contemporary Russian society under Putin.

by Andrey Platonov
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson and Eric Naiman
New York Review of Books; 2007; pp. 58
The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov's vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution.

by Alexander Pokrovsky
Translated by Noah Birksted-Breen
Glas; 2007; pp.113
Even in the absence of war, the army, anywhere, is a cruel, unsafe, and closed world, perhaps more so in Russia due to its outdated compulsory national service and poor economic conditions. Now, thanks to the growing movement of Soldiers' Mothers Committees around the country, the public is increasingly aware of the realities of life inside the army.

by Alexandr Terekhov
Translated by Natalie Roy and B.T. Gall
Alma Books; 2008; pp. 347
Rats and human beings aren't that far apart from each other in "The Rat-Killer". As the political intrigue of phantasmagorical post-communist reality develops into nightmare, the greed, cunning and malice of the humans more and more resemble the behaviour of the large communities of destructive rodents, while the rats acquire more and more human features.

Professor Tony Briggs, Senior Research Fellow at Bristol University, has written, translated or edited more than twenty books on Russian and English literature. After gaining a reputation as a leading authority on Alexander Pushkin, he has turned to Tolstoy in recent years, writing for Penguin Books.