Tuesday 1 March / 1pm New York / 6pm London / 7pm Prague + Vienna / 9pm Moscow / Online / Tickets
UPDATE 1 MARCH: Following this morning’s bombing of Kharkiv, we have decided to postpone this event for now. Updates to follow in due time. Solidarity with Ukraine!
You see, I’m not anywhere: not at the baths, not the bookstores, not at the market,
Not even my name is anywhere, people say of me, ‘you know, him’
Maria Stepanova and Eugene Ostashevsky’s ‘Ovid Void’, as featured in THE WHITE REVIEW No. 32, is an experimental version of Ovid’s Tristia, composed after the Roman writer was exiled to the Black Sea. Ovid’s poetry of exile, as Stepanova and Ostashevsky point out in the afterword, is a much more important presence in the Russian poetic tradition than in the English-language one; Russian-language writers are frequently faced with exile, political repression and intimidation.
Maria Stepanova and Eugene Ostashevsky will be exploring these themes together with writer and journalist Hamid Ismailov. In Ismailov’s varied novels, the absurdity and cruelty with which political oppression works on the individual is highlighted with rich intertextual references. The three writers will be in conversation with TWR managing editor Theodora Danek.
A Zoom link will be sent to all attendees on the day of the event. Please consider donating to support the work of THE WHITE REVIEW and its writers.
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HAMID ISMAILOV is a journalist, poet and writer, most recently of Manaschi (translated by Donald Rayfield). He was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state dubbed ‘unacceptable democratic tendencies’. He is Radio Free Europe’s Regional Director for Central Asia.
EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY is the author of, most recently, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (New York Review of Books, 2017), a poetry book about pirate-parrot communication.
MARIA STEPANOVA is a Russian poet and the author of the poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals and the novel In Memory of Memory, both translated by Sasha Dugdale and published in 2021. In Memory of Memory was recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
