ABOUT US

St. Petersburg Review, Inc. is a Delaware nonprofit corporation that is seeking IRC 501(c)(3) status, and is currently receiving tax-deductible contributions through Summer Literary Seminars, Inc. a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation that shares the journal’s cross-cultural, literary purpose. Its mission is to foster awareness of contemporary American, Russian, and international writers in English translation by publishing fiction, poetry, and informative nonfiction; to provide a forum for vibrant cultural and literary exchange; and to confirm St. Petersburg's standing as an international cultural and literary mecca.

The publication of the Inaugural Issue is targeted for late May/early June 2007 and will include, as a special feature, a selection of poetry and fiction written by women in the GULAG. The writings have also been adapted in a Russian play which will, with
SPR's support, be presented at SLS this summer. The one-act play, which is being performed in Russia (and was recently performed at UNH and Harvard) is called "The Roads We Did Not Choose" and was born out of several publications, including "The Journey," published by The Return (Vozvrashchenie), a Russian historical-literary society dedicated to the history of terror, directed by Semen Vilensky in Moscow. The play is performed by two women, Ol'ga Nepakharova, a native of Moscow who completed her acting degree at the G. R. Derzhavin International Slavic Institute in 2001, and Elena Tokmakova-Gorbushina, a native of Ufa in the Bashku Republic, who completed her degree in acting in 1999 at the Yaroslavl State Theater Institute. Nepakharova and Tokmakova-Gorbushina have not accepted any pay for their work, which they see as a memorialization of women victims of the GULAG and a vehicle for keeping their writings in the Russian national consciousness.

Other authors appearing in Issue 1 will include Jeffrey Renard Allen, Aimee Bender, Kenneth Calhoun, Regina Derieva (translated by Jim Kates), Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (translated by Genya Turovskaya), Jonathan Fink, Sergey Gandlevsky (translated by Alexander Stessin), Dmitry Golynko (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, Matvei Yankelevich, and Simona Schneider), Mark Halperin, Christine Hume, Viktor Ivaniv (translated by Peter Golub), Eugen Jebeleanu (translated by Matthew Zapruder), Richard Katrovas, Dmitry Kuzmin (translated by Yulia Idlis), Dylan Landis, Adam Levin, Timothy Liu, Josip Novakovich, Gina Ochsner, Eugene Ostashevsky, Padgett Powell, Dmitrii Prigov (translated by Christopher Mattison), Liz Rosenberg, George Saunders, Elena Shvarts (translated by Rebecca Wangh), Alexander Skidan (tranlated by Genya Turovskaya), Peter Trachtenberg, and Matvei Yankelevich.