The University of Michigan’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) and Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) are pleased to host a symposium, “Ann Arbor in Russian Literature: Revisiting the Carl R. Proffer and Ardis Legacies.”

The symposium will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the birth of U-M Professor Carl R. Proffer (1938-84), an outstanding scholar renowned for his books on Gogol and Nabokov. In his brief 46 years Carl Proffer contributed to the field of Russian literature as an author, translator, editor, and publisher, and put Ann Arbor on the map of Russian literature in perpetuity. In 1971 with his wife Ellendea, also a scholar, author, and translator, he founded Ardis which became the foremost Western publisher of Russian and Soviet literature, including reprints and translations of classics as well as works banned by the Soviet authorities. Symposium presenters will explore Ardis Publishers’ consequential role as a citadel of Russian literature and U-M’s rich legacy as a center for the study of dissent in the Soviet Union and as a refuge for Soviet writers and artists (including Joseph Brodsky, poet-in-residence at U-M, 1972-81).

Presenters: Barbara Heldt, professor emerita of Russian and women’s studies, University of British Columbia; Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor and former Moscow bureau chief, The Washington Post; Irina Prokhorova, literary critic, cultural historian, and head of the New Literary Observer magazine and publishing house; Gerald Smith, professor emeritus of Russian, University of Oxford; Ellendea Proffer Teasley, co-founder of Ardis Publishers and MacArthur Fellow; and Alexei Tsvetkov, poet and essayist

This session will also include a roundtable with former Ardis editors and translators Nancy Beardsley, William Kalvin, Fred Moody, Christine Rydel, and Mary Ann Szporluk.