Rafał Wojasiński: where to start with the writer of Poland’s forgotten people
Who Rafał Wojasiński is, and where to start reading him in English: The Forgotten, Olanda and Tefil, all translated by Charles S. Kraszewski.
Read the essayFrom the journal
Notes and essays
Essays and notes on translation, the books we publish, and the literatures of the Slavic world and beyond.
More from the journal
Hamid Ismailov: Where to Start with the Uzbek Novelist
Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist, poet and translator whose books are banned in his own country and widely translated beyond it. If you…
Read more
Lviv in Books: A Reader’s Walk Through the City of Lions
Lviv is a literary city in a precise and slightly awkward sense: it has been described, argued over and mythologised in Ukrainian, Polish, German…
Read more
The History of Belarus: From Polotsk to Independence
The history of Belarus is the history of a European people who spent close to a thousand years inside other people’s states without dissolving…
Read more
The Brother Who Coined the Word Robot
Somewhere in the world, in the last few seconds, someone has said the word robot. It is one of the very few words that…
Read more
Chernobyl at 40: What We Still Get Wrong About the Worst Nuclear Disaster in History
At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, a thermal explosion tore through Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The blast was…
Read more
Vasyl Stus: Words Stronger Than Bars – Ukraine’s Poet of Resistance
Table of Contents Introduction Background: A Poet Born Into Resistance The Literary Voice of a Dissident Creativity as an Act of Defiance Artistic Techniques…
Read more
The World Caught Him, But It Could Not Hold Him: Hryhorii Skovoroda, Ukraine’s Wandering Philosopher
Long before the age of self-help gurus, a man roamed the roads of Ukraine with little more than a bag, a flute, and a…
Read more
The Pen as a Sword: How Panteleimon Kulish Forged Ukraine’s Literary Identity
Imagine a culture on the brink. Its language was dismissed as a dialect, and its history was fading under an empire’s shadow. However, one…
Read more
Women Writers of 19th-Century Eastern Europe
An Introduction to the Unseen Canon In the grand library of 19th-century European literature, certain shelves are brightly lit. We know the Brontës, we…
Read more