Posts featuring Maxim Osipov

Texts in Context: José Vergara on the Russian Afterlife of James Joyce

[I]t made me slow down to appreciate how that convoluted language makes us understand life and experience anew.

This is the third edition of Texts in Context, a column in which Katarzyna Bartoszyńska seeks out academics who contribute to and elucidate the world of literary translation, revealing their deeper studies into texts both well-known and overlooked.  

Today, we trace the legacy of James Joyce to its significant resonance in Russian literature, which José Vergara examines in his cogent and deeply-researched text, All Future Plunges to the Past. By taking the work of five major Russian writers as example, Vergara illuminates the throughline of Joycean ideas and themes, both in their universality and their recontextualization and transformation amidst Soviet and Russian history. In this following interview, Vergara discusses how these writers used Joyce to make sense of their own realities, Russian-language literature in this present moment, and texts from within the prison.

Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Tell me about All Future Plunges to the Past!  

José Vergara (JV): My book examines James Joyce’s impact on Russian literature from the mid-1920s, when the first Soviet translations started appearing, through 2020. Of course, that basically means I’m looking at his “influence”—but it goes beyond that. I’m more interested in how, on one hand, Joyce became emblematic of larger trends in Russian attitudes toward Modernism, intertextuality, generational conflicts, artistic identity, and other big issues; and, on the other hand, he took on various forms or manifestations based on how certain Russian writers read him—literally and figuratively. Previous scholars had examined the critical response to Joyce in the Soviet Union and émigré communities, but they paid much less attention to his place in Russian literature itself. So, in All Future Plunges to the Past, I present five case studies of major writers who addressed Joyce directly in their fiction: Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin. The book explores how and why they were drawn to Joyce’s novels and ideas, interpreting them as an alternative path in world literature based on their respective biographical, historical, and cultural contexts. In this reading, Joyce becomes a prism through which to interrogate the question of cultural heritage in Russia, and a means for these writers to better understand themselves and their work. That’s at the core of the book: the question of literary lineages and how artists fashion their own histories through their writing.

KB: How artists fashion their own histories in their writing: could you say a little more about that?

JV: The central through line of my book is fathers and children, primarily sons. It struck me that the aforementioned writers were all, in one way or another, engaging with Joyce’s Shakespeare theory, which Stephen Dedalus explains in episode nine of Ulysses. Basically, he argues that creative artists, such as Shakespeare, become fathers to themselves by leaving behind their works, their lineage, a version of themselves for posterity to—hopefully—admire. At the same time, Stephen suggests that you have to select a literary forefather to supplant the biological. Each of the writers I feature consider this theory and respond to it in their idiosyncratic ways. For instance, Nabokov’s protagonist in The Gift pursues this path, but not to replace his biological father, who disappeared on a scientific expedition. Instead, like Nabokov, he wants to unite the cultural heritage that he lost as a result of the 1917 Revolution, and to bridge those gaps in emigration. All their readings of Joyce are operating on this metatextual level, as they come to terms with who they are in the history of Russian literature. READ MORE…

Winter 2018: A Treasure Hunt Without A Map

That viewer is me, is you, is us: readers of Asymptote, a journal offering the freedom of infinite interpretations.

Thanks to the hard work of Duncan Lewis, Jacob Silkstone, József Szabo, Marina Sofia, Emma Page, Kyrstin Rodriguez, Giorgos Kassiteridis, Tiffany Tsao, Alexander Dickow, and myself, November 2017 sees the launch of the Asymptote Book Club, a sustainability initiative meant to support independent publishers of world literature while also helping Asymptote stay afloat. By January 2018, after an intensive marketing campaign (e.g., I answer some questions about the Book Club here), we succeed in attracting more than 120 subscribers. In addition, our seventh anniversary is greeted by two important milestones, both to do with the number 100: We cross the 100 mark for number of team members on our masthead, and, with the addition of Amharic and Montenegrin in the Winter 2018 edition, we have gathered work from exactly 100 languages in our archive of world literature! In his interview with Asymptote that we ran in this issue, Lithuanian editor Marius Burokas laments that, as with many peripheral literatures, Lithuanian writing “can only speak of a one-way influence” from English at the moment; that said, Lithuanian literature is by no means a “small [one].” “There are only writers who are not good enough,” he observes wryly, “or writers who are not publicized enough.” This speaks to the very heart of Asymptote’s mission, which is why we have whole teams (from social media to graphic design) set up for the purpose of marketing the work that we’ve been entrusted with, as detailed in an earlier post where I released this publicity report. Where we direct our efforts applies to where we direct our funds as well: For instance, by January 2018, the money we’ve cumulatively thrown at Facebook promotion alone has exceeded $10,000 USD. It’s not only money that I’ve staked personally; in our eight years, I’ve supported almost every single Facebook post in order to encourage other team members as well as our own readers to engage with Asymptote’s feed, all so that we can be a more powerful advocate for so-called “small literatures.” Cruelly, then, around this time, because of the backlash from Russian interference of the 2016 US elections, Facebook deprioritizes social media pages like ours, hurting our ability to connect authors with new readers. I know because I was still supervising the new English Social Media Managers (as well as the Assistant Director of Outreach—whose day job was in social media analytics—I was hoping to install as a permanent team member) from the hospital ward where I was quarantined after radioactive treatment, anxious as much about our falling social media engagement as my own Geiger counter reading (which on the other hand refused to fall as quickly as the doctor and I had hoped, thereby prolonging my hospitalization and resulting in a larger medical bill). Here to introduce the Winter 2018 issue is Brazil editor-at-large Lara Norgaard.

Two parallel snapshots of everyday scenes spliced by double-circle frames form the cover image of Asymptote’s Winter 2018 issue. A woman calmly pushes a stroller on the left, mirroring a different woman on the right who wears dark sunglasses and stares directly into the camera, allowing us to only guess at her penetrating gaze. In these cover photographs, the edition’s guest artist, Elephnt, captures one of its central components: the way each contribution takes a powerful approach to perspective. The authors in this issue all write with a particular and intense gaze that confronts or perhaps commiserates with the reader.

I decided to look back at the woman on the right as I prepared to write this reflection. It is not just her staring back at me that catches my eye; she seems to recognize the camera, to acknowledge how the image representing her was created. The Winter 2018 issue of Asymptote was my first as part of the magazine’s team. I witnessed—and participated in—the compilation of so many voices into one unified whole. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2018

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Winter 2018 issue!

To celebrate our seventh birthday here at Asymptote, the blog editors have chosen some of our favorite pieces from the Winter 2018 issue to showcase. This issue truly shines with a diversity of voices and literary styles, including a special feature on micro fiction, and it was such a pleasure for us to read through it. With work from thirty different countries, this issue has been gathered under the theme of “A Different Light.” Enjoy these highlights!

I’ve always admired Asymptote‘s advocacy for literatures that not only are underrepresented, but that take chances, resist easy reduction or interpretation by the reader. Poems that dare to be “the awkward spectacle of the untried move, not grace” (to borrow a phrase from American poet Don Byrd). Poets like Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. The poems from Arachnid Sun shock me with their bold imagery, impelling me to read again and again. I latch on to certain repeated images: insect, illusion, blood. And definitely a noticeable theme of authoritarian rulers: “spider-eggs perfuming the silence the dictator” and “harpoon the king-shark who flees the riverbeds of polar scrubland.”

READ MORE…