Roman talks with José Vergara about Joyce's influence on Soviet and post-Soviet Russian literature. We talk literary heritage, the dangers of translating Ulysses under Stalin, the birth of Social Realism (and its ugly stepsister, Capitalist Primitivism), the schizophrenic nature of the late Soviet period, émigré writing, and Joyce's continued influence on contemporary Russian writers. A fascinating talk that sheds much light on both Joyce and Russian lit.
Writers discussed include: Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin (cameos of sorts by Victor Pelevin and William Gaddis).
José's book, "All future plunges to the past : James Joyce in Russian literature," was published by Cornell University Press in 2021.