![]() There are plenty of characters I like, but she’s the one who’s unfailingly interesting and the one who recurs in so many stories. And the stories are so various about her. SF: Baba Yaga, of course! She’s so cool, she clearly was a goddess in some previous stage of the culture. YC: You teach a course in Russian fairy tales, which has been very popular among students. Just the brilliant, brilliant things they do with the language. Tsvetaeya is also fabulous - Brodsky learned a lot from her - and again, she’s my dissertation poet. And, you know, the beautiful use of words. So if you read someone like Joseph Brodsky, you find yourself responding physiologically - there are things he does with enjambments that just take my breath away. But aside from the ways the poetry has been used to justify an imperial project, Russian poetry really has a Pavlovian effect on the reader. SF: The poetry, absolutely one hundred percent. YC: What is your favorite part of Russian or Russian culture? I really don’t know what’s going to happen to the profession given current events. We only have the people in the middle now. And then there were ones in the middle who just thought it was cool, and I was from that group in the middle, obviously, but we’ve lost the crazy hair and we’ve lost the polished shoes. There were the ones with very short hair and perpetually polished shoes, and you knew where they were going. There were the ones with wild eyes and crazy hair, who wanted to freak out their parents. I would say in my graduate school teaching before that, we had three kinds of students taking Russian. And many students were interested in taking Russian. I should say that I finished graduate school right in the balmy years of Glasnost and Perestroika, when many institutions were adding Russian programs that hadn’t had them before. I just figured let’s try this and see what happens. YC: When did you know you wanted to be a professor in Russian? I put it in the desk drawer, and every day I would pull it out and look, and then I thought I would really like to apply for that job, and through many serendipities I actually got it, so it worked out nicely. It was sort of six inches tall, and a whole page wide. And I thought, women writers and poetry, that’s what I want to do. And Thompson Bradley, who was still here, was a nineteenth-century specialist who worked closely on prose. I was flipping through it and saw that Swathmore was looking for a professor who worked on women writers and poetry, because the person retiring hadn’t done those things. SF: At that point, the MLA (Modern Language Association) job list was only on paper, and I picked up a copy in the main office of the Department of German and Russian at Oberlin. ![]() So it seemed better to stay here for the moment and work on somebody whose archive was closed. In Russia you couldn’t get diapers, and people were standing in line for hours to get food. Then I had a little baby, and it was a bad, bad moment in the late 80s, early 90s. And one reason I picked her was that her archive was closed until the year 2000. I wrote my dissertation on a Russian poet named Marina Tsvetaeva, who also wrote wonderful essays. My first teaching job was at Oberlin College, and then I came to Swarthmore, which I really, really liked because Swarthmore has topography, and I like topography a lot. I mean, there were all these really interesting literatures from Eastern Europe. I went to former Yugoslavia in 1986 and got my speaking skills and reading skills up to a better level because at the time when I started graduate school, they really weren’t emphasizing other Slavic languages and they always would say “other” or “second languages,” even though people might want to specialize in Polish or something. But I got into graduate school and figured, let’s go check that out. I graduated in 1983, which was during the Cold War, and Russia was in a long phase known as the Era of Stagnation. It was a course on Russian poetry that really pulled me in. I was going to be a French major, but I got sucked into Russian and just really liked it. Sibelan Forrester: I grew up in Colorado, wanted to get as far away as I could to go to college, and wound up at Bryn Mawr College, which I had not visited before going there. Yerin Chang: What is your academic background and some of your teaching and research interests? This week, The Phoenix spoke with Professor Forrester about her publication and her experiences studying and teaching Eastern European literature and Russian at Swarthmore. She recently translated “The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad” by Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko, published by Harvard University Press. An award-winning translator, Professor Forrester has published translations from Serbian, Croatian, and Russian. ![]() She specializes in twentieth-century Russian poetry and Russian women writers. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College.
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