Samizdat Translation and the Journal Predlog

• In Event: Translation and the Problem of Preservation of Cultural Memory

Abstract

This paper discusses the samizdat journal of translation Predlog (Pretext) and its preservation of cultural memory. Translators who participated in this quarterly 1984-1989 self-publication advanced a vision of world literature that differed from the one promoted in Inostrannaia literatura (Foreign Literature) and by Soviet translation publishers. What literary politics can we discern in their choices? What was the fate of their translations? This paper offers a partial description of what is preserved in Predlog, rare copies of which are now scattered across archives, and asks what the project can tell us about remembering as resistance in the Leningrad underground.

Author

• Laura Little, Connecticut College