Gennady Gor (1907-1981), born in a tsarist prison, belonged to the avant-garde circles of Leningrad in the 1930s, but was ostracized for his “formalist” novel The Cow. After the Siege and his return from evacuation in Alma-Ata, he became a well-known scholar, collector of the art of Northern ethnicities, and science fiction writer. He was renowned in Leningrad as an art historian and young writers’ mentor.

Dmitry Maksimov (1904-1987), was a renowned philologist and specialist of early twentieth-century Russian poetry. As a young poet, he discussed his works with Nikolay Zabolotsky and Konstantin Vaginov, writers close to the OBERIU circle. At the end of his life, he published in Switzerland his only book of poetry under the pseudonym Ignaty Karamov.

Sergey Rudakov (1909-1944), was a philologist and poet and friend of Osip Mandelstam during his Voronezh exile. After spending the Siege winter in Leningrad, he died in action. He was a friend and relative of Konstantin Vaginov.

Vladimir Sterligov (1904-1973), was an artist in the circle of Kazimir Malevich, one of the leaders of the Leningrad avant-garde. He was a close friend of the leaders of OBERIU, Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky, the latter whose son he baptized.

Pavel Zaltsman (1912-1985), an artist, belonged to the circle of Pavel Filonov, one of the leaders of the Leningrad avant-garde. He spent most of his life working for film studios, first in Leningrad, then in Alma-Ata.

Charles Swank graduated from Hampshire college, where he studied literature, translation, and Russian. He lives and works in western Massachusetts.

Anand Dibble was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He studied Russian and literary translation at Hampshire College under the guidance of Polina Barskova and spent a year in St. Petersburg studying at Smolny Institute where his behavior and writing were checked by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. He currently lives in Kyiv, where he writes a technology blog during the day and poetry at night. He has been previously published in the Ampersand Review.

Ben Felker-Quinn studied Russian and literary translation at Hampshire College when he worked on poetry of Mandelshtam, Vvedensky, and Brodsky. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Ainsley Morse has been translating 20th- and 21st-century Russian and (former-) Yugoslav literature since 2006. She teaches Russian language and literature at Dartmouth College. Previous UDP publications include the co-translation of Vsevolod Nekrasov (with Bela Shayevich, UDP 2013) and Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems (also with Shayevich, 2017). Other recent translations include the farcical Soviet pastoral Beyond Tula, by Andrey Egunov, and a collection of theoretical essays by the brilliant Formalist Yuri Tynianov. Coming up is the macabre modernist prose of Konstantin Vaginov and a number of contemporary Russian women poets.

Eugene Ostashevsky (Leningrad, 1968) grew up in New York and lives in Berlin. His latest chapbook is The Feeling Sonnets (Clinic Publishing). His latest full-length book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB), discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rink as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt, it won the 2019 International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster, and was the pretext of a mini-opera by Lucia Ronchetti at the Venice Biennale. His previous books include The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (UDP) and Iterature (UDP). As translator from Russian, he works primarily with OBERIU, the 1920s-1930s underground circle led by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. He has edited the first English-language collection of their writings, called OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern). His collection of Alexander Vvedensky’s poetry, An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB), with contributions by Matvei Yankelevich, won the 2014 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is currently preparing, with Daniel Mellis, an edition of Tango with Cows, a 1913 book of visual poetry by the Russian Futurist Vasily Kamensky, which is forthcoming from UDP in 2021. He also edited and co-translated collections by the contemporary Russian poets Dmitry Golynko, As It Turned Out (UDP), and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan).

Rebekah Smith is a writer, editor, and translator.

Jason Wagner was raised on a hammock in the swamps of North Central Florida. He studied Russian Literature at Hampshire College. In the fall he will begin graduate studies at the University of Michigan.

Matvei Yankelevich is a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and has curated UDP’s Eastern European Poets Series since 2002, and was a co-editor of 6×6 (2000-2017). His most recent book of poetry is Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square). His co-translation (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), received a National Translation Award. His translations of Daniil Kharms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook). He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for Humanities. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Polina Barskova is a poet and a scholar, author of twelve collections of poems and two books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, “Living Pictures,” received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is forthcoming in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has three collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House) and Relocations (Zephyr Press). She has taught at Hampshire College, Amherst College, and Smith College. In 2021, she will be teaching Russian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

Ilya Kukulin, a literary scholar and a cultural historian, is the author of Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture, which won the Andrey Bely Prize (2015), and has edited six volumes of critical work, ranging from the history of schooling in the 20th Century Eastern Europe to the cultural practices of the internal colonization in Russia. His articles on Russian literature have been published in the United States, Russia, Germany, Norway, China, Lithuania, and Armenia. In Moscow, he is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the National Research University, a Senior Researcher at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, and a Senior Researcher for the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. rn