Professional Affiliation

Assistant Professor of Russian, Hunter College (CUNY)

Expert Bio

Yasha Klots received his Ph.D. in Russian literature from Yale University in 2011 and M.A. from Boston College in 2005. Before joining Hunter College, CUNY, in 2016, he taught at Georgia Institute of Technology, Williams College and Yale. In 2014-2016, he was a Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research interests include Russian and East European émigré literature and book history, contemporary Russian poetry, linguistic anthropology, bilingualism and literary translation, Gulag narratives (in particular, Shalamov), urbanism, the mythology of St. Petersburg and representation of other cities in Russian literature. In 2010, he published Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (St. Petersburg: Perlov Design Center; in Russian), and co-translated, with Ross Ufberg, Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP). His most recent book is Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Moscow: NLO, 2016; in Russian), which includes his introduction and annotated interviews with sixteen Russian and East European poets. He is currently completing a monograph Tamizdat, the Cold War and Contraband Russian Literature (1960-1970s) devoted to the circulation, reception and first publications of manuscripts from the Soviet Union in the West. He is also the director of Tamizdat Project, an online archive of documents on “contraband” Russian literature (1956-1991).

Expertise

Russia & Eurasia 

Wilson Center Project

“Tamizdat: Banned Books from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” ; “Tamizdat, the Cold War, and Contraband Russian Literature (1956-1991)”

Project Summary

Publishing Russian literature extraterritorially (in tamizdat) was as emblematic of the late Soviet era as official state publishing (gosizdat) and underground dissemination of manuscripts (samizdat) inside the country. Tamizdat Project explores how and why clandestine masterpieces of Russian literature, banned or censored at home, were smuggled out and printed elsewhere, with or without their authors’ knowledge or consent. A pioneering study of their reception on both sides of the Curtain, the Project contributes to the fields of Russian literary history and culture by collecting, annotating and publishing sources that shaped tamizdat as a practice and institution of the late Soviet era.

Major Publications

• Yakov Klots. Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Moscow: NLO, 2016; in Russian)
• “Varlam Shalamov Between Tamizdat and the Soviet Writers’ Union (1966-1978),” Russian Literature 86-98C (2018), 137-166; Colta.ru (January 10, 2017): http://www.colta.ru/articles/literature/13546
• “The Way Back. Kathryn Feuer’s and Gleb Struve’s Letters on Academic Exchange, Yulian Oksman and Crossing the Soviet-Finnish Border (June, 1963).” Publication, introduction and commentary by Yasha Klots. In Across Borders: 20th Century Russian Literature and Russian-Jewish Cultural Contacts. Essays in Honor of Vladimir Khazan. Ed. by Lazar Fleishman and Fedor Poljakov. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018. Pp. 557-584.