Words of Gratitude

I wish to express my deep thanks to my friend Thomas Epstein (with whom, as you can see, I share the same last name), a professor at Boston College, for his participation and help in the preparation of this book. Mr. Epstein began translating some of these essays as early as 1996 and 1997, when they were being written, and without his initiative the very concept of this bilingual book would have been unthinkable.

Although he is already known to many of you, I would like to take this opportunity to present Thomas Epstein to the Russian reader. More than many American Slavists, Thomas Epstein is closely and personally tied to the culture he studies, in his case the Leningrad-Petersburg underground. For more than a decade and a half Thomas Epstein has made biannual visits to Leningrad-Petersburg in order to study, speak, and live. His doctoral dissertation explored the relationship between thought and language in the poetry of the Oberiuts Daniel Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Nikolai Oleinikov. He has also translated a significant amount of contemporary Russian poetry and prose – works of Viktor Krivulin, Elena Shvarts, Vasily Kondrat’ev, Arkday Dragomoshchenko, Arkady Rovner, Lev Rubinshtein, and others — for various American journals and magazines. He is a regular participant in American conferences and festivals devoted to Russian poetry.

Thomas Epstein has made an important contribution to the rapprochement of Russian and American cultures at their highest level, which is precisely where they deserve to encounter each other. In 1996 he became the managing editor of the scholarly annual, “Symposium, A Journal of Russian Thought,” the only English-language journal devoted to publishing translations of Russian thinkers and to original studies of Russian philosophy. He was involved not only in the journal’s editorial decision-making but in the practicalities of the publication of each issue: without his participation the journal simply could not have existed. His own articles on Russian literature -- whether critical, biographical, or historical — approach their subject from both the inside and outside, which is something of a rarity among American Slavists. Mr. Epstein knows and experiences Russian culture from the inside, I would even say that he feels connected to its fate and enters its complex existential space as his own. Thus in his translations he is able to reproduce not only the text but the subtext, which is especially important in the translation of the Russian word given our tradition of underground existence.

One of the great successes of Russian culture has been its ability to attract the attention not only of specialists but of people with a wide variety of interests and talents. In this sense, one of Thomas Epstein’s contributions to Slavistics is that he is not only a Slavist. He is a prose writer, author of the volume “Man and a Half”; an active participant in the American literary process, editor of the magazines alea and New Arcadia, which publish contemporary prose, poetry, essays, and culturology. Thomas Epstein is also closely tied to French culture and language, having translated into English works of Paul Ricoeur, Jean Starobinski, Emile Cioran, and others. Thus in the person of Thomas Epstein Russian culture is lucky enough to have a many-sided and perceptive analyst of culture in general.

Although the limits imposed by the genre of the ‘word of thanks’ preclude me from fully expressing my feelings of indebtedness to Thomas Epstein for our now nearly ten year friendship and collaboration, I can at least – and at last — say that I find myself comfortable and unencumbered in his translations.

I am grateful to Mary Cappello, Professor of English at University of Rhode Island (Providence, USA), for our deeply enriching intellectual dialogue and for her elegant preface to this book. My thanks go to Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Professor of Slavic at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), with whom I have collaborated for many years. Jeffrey Karlsen (USA) and Edward Skidelsky (Great Britain) also deserve my sincere gratitude for their translations.

Last but not least, I want to thank Thomas Dolack, a graduate student in Slavic Studies at University of Oregon (Eugene). Since we met in Spring 2002 during my visiting professorship at this university, Thomas Dolack has translated many of my essays with rare efficiency and attention to the original.

Mikhail Epstein

Atlanta

March 10, 2004