The translator and editor would like to thank Yuz Aleshkovsky for granting permission to translate these two ground-breaking novels, and for being constantly available for clarifications and explanations of context. We have long enjoyed the supreme privilege of being Yuz’s colleagues and friends, and we are delighted to have been able to play a role in bringing these works to the English-speaking readership. We also thank Irina Aleshkovsky for her invaluable help with questions of translation and interpretation. We are grateful to Priscilla Meyer, Professor of Russian, Emerita, for bringing Yuz and Irina to Wesleyan and making Aleshkovsky’s work part of our curriculum. Sergei Bunaev provided helpful answers to translation queries. Thanks to Yuz for introducing us to his Moscow friends (Andrei Bitov, Olga Shamborant, Sergei Bocharov, the Fingerovs, the Goreliks, and the Lebedevs), who helped us understand the pleasures of being Nikolai Nikolaevich’s original audience. And thanks to William White for accurately transcribing the translator’s first attempts to speak Aleshkovsky’s wit in English.
We thank Christine Dunbar of Columbia University Press for her cheerful encouragement and for her hard work in shepherding these novels to publication. Oliver Ready, of the Editorial Board for the Russian Library series, offered detailed comments that helped us greatly improve the introduction and the translation itself. Two anonymous readers also provided excellent suggestions that we have endeavored to incorporate. Allan Berlind, Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Wesleyan, read the introduction and notes with an eye to the discussion of Soviet genetics, and we are grateful for his assistance. All remaining errors are of course our own. Thanks also to Victoria Smolkin, Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan, for suggestions on sources about Soviet science. We would also like to thank Jean Findley, Lisa Hamm, Ben Kolstad, and Leslie Kriesel for their expert work on the editing, design, and production of the book.
Wesleyan University has provided generous support in the form of sabbatical time and research grants. We thank in particular Marc Eisner, Dean of Social Sciences, and Joyce Jacobsen, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost.
Our students in courses on twentieth-century Russian literature have reacted enthusiastically to Aleshkovsky’s novels, and to his living presence, and we thank them for their responsiveness to this translation in its earlier versions.
Duffield White would like to thank his wife, Isabel Guy, for her love and support and for sharing her love of literature. Susanne Fusso thanks her husband, Joseph M. Siry, Professor of Art History and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan, for his love and support and for listening to long disquisitions on the subtleties of Russian obscenity.