About…

I have been flippant and irreverent about “about” in the past, but now I’m serious! Welcome to the russellv.com website. You can find my official Indiana University faculty bio at this link.

Somewhere around here you can find info on my books, music, editing, translation, and publishing activities. Please poke around. For anyone who likes following a narrative with links, here goes.

I am currently writing one research-based nonfiction book about Russia and another about the Adriatic, editing a collection of articles on Siberia with two colleagues, translating a book about folklore with two other colleagues, writing some music (which you can find here), and teaching in Indiana University’s Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, where I also chair the editorial board of Slavica Publishers.

I served as President of The American Literary Translators Association from 2013-16 and, before that, as Editor-in-Chief at The Iowa Review (2009-13). My work at Autumn Hill Books, which I created in 2005, continues today, though at a slower pace than previously.

My most recent translation was a very long, very good book by Miljenko Jergović, which was published by Archipelago Books in 2021.

I wrote one scholarly monograph (published in 2000) based on my PhD dissertation, and a second, published in 2014 as The Woman in the Window. I have also translated books by Igor Štiks (with Tomislav Kuzmanović), Predrag Matvejević (this one and this other one), Sabit Madaliev, and Susanna Tamaro (again with Cinzia Blum).

Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, and I edited a book devoted to the life and work of Michael Henry Heim (Open Letter Books), which came out in the fall of 2014. It’s called The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim and a Life in Translation, and here’s the listing at the publisher’s website.

The Woman in the Window was long listed for the Historia Nova Prize for the Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History (for 2014), alongside a number of other really fantastic books published in the same year. It came out in paperback in 2016.

Here are a few relatively short pieces that are easy to find online:

• Good Enough for Jesus
• The Oxymoron of Empathic Criticism
• Teaching in Translation
• Translation and Proficiency Language Teaching
• Translation and the Teaching of Literature
• A Translator’s Dilemma
• Crossing
• Crossing 2
• Crossing 3
• Crossed
• Lenin’s Empty Place
• Pierre Menard’s Alexander Blok
• Menard’s Khlebnikov
• Me Bastard, You Bastard: Multiculturalism at Home and Abroad