This panel examines how world literature, translation, and cultural transfer shaped Soviet and Cold War intellectual contexts. Artem Serebrennikov (HSE/Gorky Institute) explores Valentin Parnakh (1891–1951), a peculiar figure of the 1920s cosmopolitan avant-garde. Poet, dancer, jazz musician, and scholar, writing in French and Russian, Parnakh left behind an eclectic and overlooked legacy. The paper argues that much of Parnakh’s 1920s literary output centers on the anxiety of language and identity. Struggling with anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia, unwilling to embrace the religious aspects of Jewish culture, and fascinated by France, Parnakh sought a resolution to his dilemmas, a reconciliation of antiquity and modernity, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. He found his answer during a 1914 trip to the Levant among Ottoman Sephardic Jews, who impressed him with their unabashed Jewishness, modern outlook, and use of French as a cultural language. In Paris, Parnakh studied Sephardic converso poets persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition, employed Sephardic imagery in his poetry and memoirs (Pension Maubert). The paper argues that although Parnakh’s quest was deeply personal, it echoed similar processes in French, German, and Spanish cultures. Both Jews and Gentiles used the image of the lost Sepharad as an alternative to mainstream Ashkenazi culture.

Peter Budrin (QMUL) analyses the reception of early modern modes of intellectual self-fashioning in Soviet intellectual culture. Budrin demonstrates how models of early-modern writers such as Erasmus and Montaigne, whose reception paradoxically flourished in the totalitarian 1930s—influenced a group of intellectuals known as "the Current", led by philosophers Georg Lukács and Mikhail Lifshitz. For the thinkers discussed in this paper, Lifshitz and Leonid Pinsky, the Renaissance offered models of intellectual autonomy, serving as a means to interpret their own turbulent era.

Benjamin Musachio (Princeton) examines John Updike as a translator of Russian poetry. The paper focuses on Updike's translations of the Soviet poet Evgenii Evtushenko (1932–2017). Updike’s translations of Evtushenko were published in LIFE magazine in February 1967, coinciding with the Soviet poet's U.S. tour. As Updike did not know Russian, Albert C. Todd, a Russian literature specialist, prepared literals for Updike to poeticize. Musachio analyzes Todd's literals, Updike's drafts, and the published translations to reconstruct Updike's aesthetic motivations. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Papers at Stanford offer a privileged window into Updike's translation process. Updike's translation was part of a 1960s trend of Anglophone writers translating modern Russian poetry (Robert Lowell's translations of Osip Mandelstam; W.H. Auden's translations of Andrei Voznesenskii). What sets Updike apart is his negative evaluation of Evtushenko as a poet: Updike assumed the twofold task of both translating and improving Evtushenko's poems.