Skip to main content

Words Without Borders Logo

Words Without Borders Monagram
—
Discover by Country
—
Discover by Theme
—
Discover by Contributor
—
Surprise Me!
Read
Learn
Events
About
Follow Us
Go to instagram
Go to twitter
Go to facebook
Go to youtube
Read
—
Surprise Me!
Discover by Country
—
Discover by Theme
—
Discover by Contributor
—
Learn
Events
About
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Russia

The covers of the books featured in the Watchlist: Aya: Claws Come Out; The Djinn's Apple; Blue...
The Watchlist: February 2024
By Tobias Carroll
From an Ivorian graphic novel to a historical murder mystery from Algeria, Tobias Carroll recommends five new books in translation to read this month.
The covers of the five books featured in the Watchlist: Dandelion Daughter, The Stone Breakers,...
The Watchlist: September 2023
By Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll recommends new books in translation you won’t want to miss from Canada, Colombia, France, the Republic of the Congo, and Russia.
The covers of the books featured in the Watchlist: Sweetlust, Stravaging Strange, Black Foam, and...
The Watchlist: February 2023
By Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll recommends exciting new books translated from Arabic, Croatian, Spanish, and Russian.
A black microphone on a stand
Photo by Ilyass SEDDOUG on Unsplash
A Village Fest
By Alisa Ganieva
“It needn’t be me. I mean . . . I . . . I’m not much of an orator.”
Translated from Russian by Will Firth
Two log cabins, one with a grass roof, in a field next to the water
I, Argus fin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Sharing Stories: A Brief Introduction to Sámi Literary History
By Mathilde Magga
For Sámi literature to continue playing its essential role in our culture and to expand its benefits, we need more writers, readers, and translators, which is impossible without support—both financially and through the education system.
The book covers of Animals in Our Days, Brisbane, Flowers of Lhasa, Radio Siga, Linea Nigra, and...
The Watchlist: May/June 2022
By Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll recommends noteworthy new books translated from Tibetan, Vietnamese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and Croatian.
Until the Threads Burn to Ash
By Aleksey Porvin
Hold an assault rifle with my hand, use my mouth
Translated from Russian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler
The Water Freezes
By Alla Gorbunova
Your cheeks are pinked with Parnassus rose.
Translated from Russian by Elina Alter
Portrait of Evgeny Vodolazkin, Russian-Ukrainian novelist and scholar of medieval Russian culture.
Svklimkin, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
The Flower and the Forest: An Interview with Evgeny Vodolazkin
By José Vergara
To one degree or another, history is always a myth.
There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union
By Olga Breininger
I am the same sort of export as a Kalashnikov rifle or our great suicidal writers.
Translated from Russian by Hilah Kohen
blurry image of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ in St. Petersburg behind a canal
Murashko olga, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
About Time to Smile at Homeless People
By Dinara Rasuleva
Dinara Rasuleva questions received notions of home and national identity in this poem about her relationship to Russia.
Translated from Russian by Hilah Kohen
Multilingual
Stories from “Ings & Oughts”
By Alla Gorbunova
It wasn’t a plane at all, but a car flying through the sky.
Translated from Russian by Elina Alter
Multilingual
Three Observations, Untitled
By Ksenia Zheludova
The most horrible things, remember this, are incremental.
Translated from Russian by Josephine von Zitzewitz
MultimediaMultilingual
“Reality (Unfortunately?) Varies”: A Conversation Between Galina Rymbu and Ilya Danishevsky
By Galina Rymbu
It seems to me—perhaps naively—that poetry has the ability to examine things in a maximally authentic way.
Translated from Russian by Anne O. Fisher & Helena Kernan
Six Musical Moments by Schubert
By Natalia Rubanova
She smelled of Schubert.
Translated from Russian by Rachael Daum
Six Proposals for Participation in a Conversation about Bread
By Rasha Abbas
“That’s what we get for supporting Communism: standing in line for this black loaf.”
Translated from Arabic by Alice Guthrie
A Pun, an Idiom, and an Expletive Walk into a Bar: International Humor
By Susan Harris
When we think of translating humor, we may think in terms of capturing jokes.
The Trial
By Dalia Grinkevičiūtė
“Aren’t you ashamed, you, a schoolgirl, to be sitting here on this bench?”
Translated from Lithuanian by Delija Valiukenas
A Parallel Convergence: Three Contemporary Russian Poets
By Alex Cigale & Dana Golin
The three poets collected here are “outliers,” who yet may be read as having points of commonality with developments in post-war American poetry.
Translated from Russian
From “Poems”
By Mikhail Eremin
The post-war ruins (Roofs ripped off, / The charred walls.)
Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale
Multilingual
Eddie’s Funeral
By Amarsana Ulzytuev
But his dirty ears are resistant to their tender entreating, / And the thick lips will not stretch from these ears into a smile
Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale
Multilingual
The World on Stage: Micro-Plays in Translation
By Sarah Maitland
It is this ready route to the public, and the immediacy of response to some of the most urgent questions of our time, that gives microtheater its enduring appeal.
Grandmother’s Little Hut
By Andrei Platonov
“No one in our family lasts long. And I’m no different—I only look like I’m doing OK . . . ”
Translated from Russian by Jesse Irwin
Learn
from “The Eternal Road”
By Antti Tuuri
I had not seen meat on my plate since I left home.
Translated from Finnish by Jill Timbers
Slaves of Moscow
By Victoria Lomasko
Once there, they had been robbed of their passports and forced to work without pay for twenty hours a day.
Translated from Russian by Thomas Campbell
LearnMultimedia
The Bed
By Vladimir Vertlib
All decent Jews go to America.
Translated from German by David Burnett
Learn
The Queer Issue V: Impressions from a Passing Train
By Rohan Kamicheril
The appeal of the Queer Issue is in seeing that great ambition writ small, in discovering the swarm of details and experience that cohere into the big picture of world writing.
from “Adam’s Apple”
By Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina
His skin and hair gave off an intoxicating scent of apples.
Translated from Russian by Andrew Bromfield
February 2014 The Girls Of Nizhny Novgorod Victoria Lomasko Preview Cropped
The “Girls” of Nizhny Novgorod
By Victoria Lomasko
It's the cops who make legalization necessary.
Translated by Thomas Campbell
Traders
By Dmitri Novoselov
The ex-con took him out to the platform of the car and with one deft movement . . .
Translated from Russian by Will Firth
On the Moscow Metro and Being Gay
By Dmitry Kuzmin
As long as the image of the enemy is being concocted out of gays, I must make all my public statements exclusively as a gay man.
Translated from Russian by Alexei Bayer
Learn
On Uladzimir Niakliaeu
By Yevgeny Yevtushenko
A poet in Belarus is, as Pushkin said, more than a poet.
Translated from Russian by Maria Kozlovskaya
from “Butterfly Skin”
By Sergey Kuznetsov
It is good to kill in spring.
Translated from Russian by Andrew Bromfield
Petroleum Venus
By Alexander Snegiryov
From the heavens black gold pours down.
Translated from Russian by Arch Tait
LearnMultilingual
None of Your Business
By Natalia Klyuchareva
His mother smiled stupidly, flapped her heavily mascaraed eyelashes, and missed the plate with her fork.
Translated from Russian by Marian Schwartz
LearnMultilingual
An Uncoincidence, a Noncoincidence
By Larissa Miller
Someone rushes to a house that's been moved away.
Translated from Russian by Richard McKane
LearnMultilingual
Hello?
By Dmitry Biriukov
Admit it, pal, you’re Hoovering up every word.
Translated from Russian by Arch Tait
LearnMultilingual
Drawings on a Soccer Ball
By Andrei Sen-Senkov
the last name of the player / on the german team / translates into russian as / pig crawling up / a blond graceful creature
Translated from Russian by Peter Golub
Soul, you are a street
By Aleksey Porvin
Soul, you are a street, leading into rain / from the outskirts full of dry leaves
Translated from Russian by Peter Golub
Learn
Just Gone to Bed
By Dmitry Kuzmin
Just gone to bed
Translated from Russian by Julia Idlis
From “Broken Glass Park”
By Alina Bronsky
I hate men. Anna says good men do exist. Nice, friendly men who cook and help clean up and who earn money.
Translated from German by Tim Mohr
Babel in Paris
By Evgeny Shklovsky
Babel loved plump women. Where there’s lots of flesh there’s lots of sweetness. Lots of warmth, heat, tenderness, there’s a caress of sunshine and a velvety splash of the sea.
Translated from Russian by Byron Lindsey
From “2017”
By Olga Slavnikova
That night, under the muffled, machine-like sound of the rain, the professor dreamed that this woman had come to him.
Translated from Russian by Marian Schwartz
From “The Geographer Drank His Globe Away”
By Alexei Ivanov
Hey young fellow, it's your stop . . .
Translated from Russian by Liv Bliss
The Siblings’ Watch
By Viktor Ivaniv
Your friend sits on a pile of things, / As if a yellow star were on his chest,
Translated from Russian by Peter Golub
A Swiss Army knife
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash
Translating to and from a Native Language
By Alexei Bayer
In this essay, Alexei Bayer writes about his first and second languages, translating into English, and being translated into his native Russian.
Fragments from the Dollmaker’s Life
By Danila Davydov
1A woman tells the Dollmaker.—What happens in your shopWhy do you spend all night and day in thereIt can’t be for the sake of moneyYou wouldn’t have time to spend it anywaySo why the work…
Translated from Russian by Peter Golub
Learn
One Hundred and One Minutes . . .
By Ekaterina Taratuta
. . . of sitting around the table and talking of voyages to faraway lands and strange events,—of how it all is, and how it may be, and how it always is, and, then again, infrequently; of secret plots…
Translated from Russian by Anna Barker
The Brother’s Keeper
By Vladimir Makanin
My brother ran away from me at Kursky
Translated from Russian by Byron Lindsey
Farewell to the Queue
By Vladimir Sorokin
But enough about bygone days. Here we are—in the new, post-Communist era:
Translated from Russian by Jamey Gambrell
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Joseph Brodsky
By Valentina Polukhina
Between 2003 and 2004, Valentina Polukhina conducted a series of interviews about Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Joseph Brodsky. She spoke with former Brodsky student and executive director of The…
Ten Short Pieces
By Alex Epstein
Who, these days, hasn't woken from a dream of murdering an angel?
Translated from Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay
Multilingual
The Conversation of the Hours
By Alexander Vvedensky
I am a hermit.
Translated from Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky
The Golem in the Mirror
By Nadezhda Gorlova
I must involuntarily live in a world that the old woman has dragged back from nonexistence.
Translated from Russian by Deborah Hoffman
Learn
Dark Thoughts
By Regina Derieva
I'm almost like that dark hallway
Translated from Russian by Valzhyna Mort
Unity of Form
By Regina Derieva
People zealously granted me headless nails / and spools without thread.
Translated from Russian by Valzhyna Mort
Learn
On the Use and Abuse of Letherburg for Life
By Alexander Skidan
You will have had no difficulty recognizing the German crib tacked onto Daniil Kharms's neologism in the title of my remarks.
Translated from Russian by Thomas Campbell
The Beginning
By Anyuta Evseeva
I wake up at eight a.m. On the sixteenth floor every day at eight a.m. Sorokin sneezes.
Translated from Russian by Dinara Georgeoliani & Mark Halperin
Milgrom
By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
So the seamstress is out, and Mom must save the situation somehow, except here's the thing: there's no money.
Translated from Russian by Keith Gessen & Anna Summers
Learn
Pears from Gudauty
By Ludmila Ulitskaya
Mother loved pears that were within an inch of decaying, so that your fingers left indents and, when you bit into them, thick honeyed juice flowed out, summoning every wasp for miles around.
Translated from Russian by Arch Tait
Learn