P-p-p-pick up a Pingvin: Behind the Scenes at Penguin’s Russian Classics

Dr Cathy McAteer will present her new, freely downloadable book Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics which draws on her doctoral research of the Penguin archive to reveal key publishing and translation practices behind Penguin’s relaunch of the Russian Classics during the mid-twentieth century. She will explore the ways in which Penguin’s founder Allen Lane, the series editor E.V. Rieu, copy editor A.S.B. Glover, and a new cohort of commissioned translators (Gilbert Gardiner, Elisaveta Fen, David Magarshack, and Rosemary Edmonds) brought classic Russian authors - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Goncharov, Turgenev, Lermontov and more - to a self-improving, inquisitive, post-war British reader, and subsequently paved the way for Socialist Realist and Soviet literature – Gorky, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Vladimov – in translation.