A few years ago my two longtime colleagues and friends Cathy Nepomnyashchy and Slava Yastremski decided to expand their translation of Abram Tertz’s (Andrei Sinyavsky’s) Strolls with Pushkin book, published originally with Yale University Press in 1994 (and winner of the Translation of the Year award from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages), to include Tertz-Sinyavsky’s other famous lengthy essay on Pushkin, “A Journey to the River Black” (Puteshestvie na Chornuiu rechku). Unfortunately Cathy took ill, underwent lengthy debilitating treatments, and eventually passed away in March 2015 before being able even to commence work on the project. Following her untimely death, Slava asked me to join him in completing the translation to honor Cathy’s memory. He had already done a draft of the first half. Since I knew Cathy so well from our graduate school days at Columbia University, I immediately agreed and began to translate the second half of the essay, which analyzes aspects of Pushkin’s novella The Captain’s Daughter and also describes Andrei Sinyavsky’s actual pilgrimage to the River Black, the location in St. Petersburg of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin’s fateful duel in 1837. Sadly, Slava also succumbed after a lengthy illness in November 2015, before he could finish the project.
Not to be deterred by Slava’s passing and with the support of Christine Dunbar at Columbia University Press, I decided to complete the translation to honor both Cathy and Slava. With the assistance of Slava’s wife, Irina Yastremski, I was able to download the first half of his draft translation of the Tertz essay from his laptop and proceeded to edit that. I had already done a draft translation of the second half, so I engaged my former graduate student and recent University of Toronto Ph.D., Olha Tytarenko, whose main area of expertise is nineteenth-century Russian literature, to act as native informant. I am grateful to her for doing a marvelous close reading of the translation in comparing it to the original, which resulted in great improvements, though I, of course, am responsible for any errors that might have slipped through.
I had been peripherally engaged in Slava’s and Cathy’s translation project long before, since Slava on several occasions consulted me regarding sticky wickets in the original Strolls with Pushkin book. I remember Slava giving me passages to review and relating the lively back-and-forth between him and Cathy as they were executing their translation. That constant interchange is always an integral part of the dialectal process by which a team works out the best possible translation. And their result, of course, was admirable.
I’d known Cathy Nepomnyashchy from the day I took my first graduate course at Columbia University in 1975. She was a nurturing classmate, colleague, and friend, without whose help and guidance I never would have been able to survive graduate school. Her assurances, particularly during my first week of classes as well as over the course of our studies together, helped me to bolster my self-confidence and to overcome both real and psychological impediments placed before Ph.D. students at high-powered research universities like Columbia. I recall the many conversations with a coterie of fellow graduate students that went on late into the night, often until 1–2 a.m, at Cathy’s tiny apartment on 81st Street about things literary and about life. I vividly remember going with her to listen to Andrei Sinyavsky speak for the first time in the United States in a packed auditorium at the Harriman Institute. Cathy boldly approached after his presentation to ask a question about his writing that he answered succinctly as he was being escorted out of the auditorium. His kind and extremely helpful one-word answer gave Cathy the impetus to continue working on his writing and eventually to complete her book Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime (Yale University Press, 1996). I also vividly remember meeting with Cathy and fellow graduate student Peter Scotto in a Mexican restaurant on the Upper West Side and conjuring up the idea to establish our own graduate student journal of Slavic literature with the peculiar name Ulbandus Review, the title of which came from esoteric knowledge Peter and I had garnered in Professor George Shevelov’s Slavic linguistics classes. On a shoestring budget fueled at first by bake sales and with a cohort of our fellow graduate students, including our close mutual friend Carol Ueland, we published several issues and learned the editing and publication process from the ground up and inside out. That experience served to focus us on publishing as an integral part of our future careers.
Cathy was an extraordinarily generous person too, with her time, always ready to help others at the drop of a hat. She shared her notes from classes, the files she used for preparing for her comprehensive exams, and her always sage advice. She even shared her family’s vacation house overlooking Guana Bay on the island of St. Maarten for my honeymoon. Cathy really was the leader in inspiring all the Columbia Slavic Department graduate students to live by a golden rule, not to be competitive with one another but to be supportive instead, and always to be a good colleague and friend.
After earning her Ph.D., Cathy went on to truly become a force in Slavic studies. She worked in harmony with everyone in the field. She made her mark with her publications on Soviet-period authors such as Sozhenitsyn and Sinyavsky, as well as her first literary love, Pushkin (she coedited, with Ludmila Trigos and Nicole Svobodny, a collection of essays on Pushkin, Under the Skies of My Africa [Northwestern University Press, 2006]). And as a faculty member at Barnard and Columbia and as Director of the Harriman Institute (the first woman to hold that position), she caringly nurtured new generations of Slavists. Despite constant multitasking pulling her in many directions simultaneously, she had the unique ability to get things done and to support and energize people to work toward a common cause or to help individuals reach self-fulfillment.
Cathy’s body of scholarly work that she left for posterity is incredibly broad and influential. Besides the books already noted, she coedited Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference (Slavica Publishers, 2008) with Hilde Hoogenboom and Irina Reyfman and was working on a book entitled Nabokov and His Enemies: Terms of Engagement when she succumbed. She also published more than forty scholarly articles on a wide range of topics, including: Andrei Sinyavsky/Abram Tertz, Tatiana Tolstaya, Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian émigré literary criticism, Vladimir Putin, Jane Austen in Russia, Sherlock Holmes films in the Soviet Union and Russia, Alexandra Marinina and the new Russian detective novel, Perestroika, a comparison of high and low culture in Russian and American culture, Russian literary classics in film, and many others. She authored numerous encyclopedia articles and book reviews. Cathy truly made an enormous contribution to the fields of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet studies in the United States. This was acknowledged by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages’ Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Profession in 2011 and the 2013 Harriman Institute Alumna of the Year Award.
I got to know Slava Yastremski a little later than Cathy. We met at Yale University in 1982 when I took my first job as an assistant professor. Slava had arrived there a year earlier and was in charge of the third-year Russian program, while I was in charge of the second-year program and TAs. We hit it off immediately and became close friends and collaborators. Slava first helped me as a native informant for a translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry collection After Russia (Ardis Publishers, 1990). He was incredibly well read in all periods of Russian literature and a virtual walking encyclopedia of Russian culture. Our initial collaboration showed us that combining the efforts of a native speaker of Russian and one of English, who knew each other’s non-native language well, was a productive way to translate complicated literary texts. After I took a position at Penn State University in 1988 and Slava moved to a tenure-track job at Bucknell University in 1990, our collaboration continued more intensely over the short Route 45 corridor between our two institutions. We published two books of Olga Sedakova’s poetry and prose with Bucknell Press, two books of Igor Klekh’s prose with Northwestern Press and Glagoslav Publishers, a book of Nadezhda Ptushkina’s plays with Glagoslav, and most recently a second book of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry, also with Glagoslav. It was always a joy working with Slava, and I learned so much from him about the Russian language, the art of translation, and conveying the nuances and stylistic registers of words and expressions in texts. Our working principle would be to divide a text in two, each translate our half of it, then exchange the translations for editing. We would then come together to resolve any problems left unanswered. Slava worked the same way with Cathy on the Strolls with Pushkin book. I learned that he was a master of the footnote and the introduction. His knowledge of Russian literature was so broad and thorough that he caught virtually every subtext or echo of other writers in the texts we translated. In all the time we worked together, I don’t remember any problem to which we couldn’t come to a mutually acceptable creative solution.
Besides the works Cathy and Slava left behind for posterity, I will always remember them both mostly for their good hearts and good spirits. May this new translation represent the fulfillment of their vision and serve as a small tribute to all they have done for the field and for others. It was the least I could do in gratitude for all they have given to me personally and to the field of Slavic studies over the years.
Michael M. Naydan
Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, The Pennsylvania State University