Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 8, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a panel discussion featuring the editors and translators of A Hundred Years of Childhood: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Children, 1917-2017. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
A Hundred Years of Childhood: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Children, 1917-2017 is the first of two volumes featuring works for children and teens in English translation, many appearing in English for the first time. The volume includes poetry and prose for young children written by thirty-six renowned authors from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, translated by eighteen translators. The second volume, Coming of Age in a Complicated Century: An Anthology of Russian Writing for Teens, 1917-2017, consisting of works for adolescents, will be published this year. The collection’s editors, Olga Bukhina, Kelly Herold, and Andrea Lanoux, along with four of the collection’s translators — Jane Bugaeva, Sibelan Forrester, Ainsley Morse, and Matvei Yankelevich — will discuss textual selection for both volumes, as well as the diverse translation strategies reflected in the books. Additionally, they will read excerpts from the texts in English and Russian, including Soviet children’s classics and works by contemporary authors who are still publishing today.
Olga Bukhina is a translator, writer, children’s books specialist, and independent scholar based in New York City. She has translated over fifty books from English into Russian, primarily children’s books. She is the author of The Ugly Duckling, Harry Potter, and Others: A Guide to Children’s Books about Orphans (2016) and Life and Death: The Most Important Issues of Children’s Literature (2024), as well as a co-author (with Kelly Herold and Andrea Lanoux) of Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens, 1991–2017 (2022).
Kelly Herold is a professor at Grinnell College, where she teaches Russian language, literature, and culture. Her scholarly work centers on French and Russian cultural and literary exchange (1770–1830) and contemporary young adult literature in Russia and the United States.
Andrea Lanoux is Elizabeth S. Kruidenier ’48 Professor of Slavic Studies at Connecticut College, where she teaches Russian, courses on Slavic cultures, and a first-year seminar on Ukraine. Her research focuses on Russian children’s literature, women in Slavic cultures, and literary canon formation.
Jane Bugaeva emigrated to the United States from Russia at the age of six. Her translations of children’s literature include Anna Starobinets’s Catlantis (Pushkin Press; NYRB, 2016) and the four-book series Beastly Crimes (Dover Publications, 2018–19), as well as Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s The New Adventures of Helen: Magical Tales (Deep Vellum, 2021), and the illustrated nonfiction book The Trans-Siberian Railway by A. Litvina and A. Desnitskaya (Thames & Hudson, 2021).
Sibelan Forrester is Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College, where she teaches language, literature, and the theory and practice of translation. She has translated fiction, folktales, poetry, and scholarly prose from Croatian, Serbian, and Russian, including Vladimir Propp’s The Russian Folktale (Wayne State University Press, 2012), and Historical Roots of the Wondertale (Indiana University Press, 2025). Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume The Russian Intelligentsia: Myth, Mission, and Metamorphosis (Academic Studies Press, 2025).
Ainsley Morse teaches in the Literature department at UC-San Diego and translates from Russian, Ukrainian and the languages of former Yugoslavia. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, particularly unofficial or “underground” poetry, as well as the avant-garde, children’s literature and contemporary poetry. With Anastasiya Osipova, she co-runs Cicada Press, a small press that publishes Eastern European and Russian poetry in translation; she also consults, translates, and edits for Tamizdat Projects Press.
Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor based in New York. His translations from Russian include works by Elena Guro, Daniil Kharms, Osip Mandelstam, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. He was a co-recipient (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of the National Translation Award for An Invitation for Me to Think by Alexander Vvedensky (NYRB Poets, 2013). He is the Editor-in-Chief at World Poetry, a non-profit publisher of poetry in translation. He teaches translation at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
