Overview

A bestselling sensation in Russia, where it was called the most significant cultural event of the year (Ogoniok), Word for Word is nothing less than the story of a nations literary conscience the history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of single person. A child of the 1920s, Lilianna Lungina was a Russian Jew born to privilege, spending her childhood in Germany, France and Palestine. But when her parents moved to the USSR when she was thirteen, Lungina became witness to many of the eras greatest upheavals. Exiled during World War II, dragged to KGB headquarters to report on her cosmopolitan friends, and subjected to her new countrys ruthless, systematic anti-Semitism, Lungina nonetheless carved out a remarkable career as a translator who introduced hundreds of thousands of Soviet readers to Knut Hamsun, August Strindberg and, most famously, Astrid Lindgren. In the process, she found herself at the very centre of Soviet cultural life, meeting and befriending Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn and many other major figures of the eras literature. Her extraordinary memoir at once heartfelt and unsentimental is an unparalleled tribute to a lost world.

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9780715649220

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'This memoir has left the strongest impression on me of any book in the past several years' Boris Akunin, author of The White Queen

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Lilianna Lungina was a leading literary translator in the Soviet Union. She translated, among many authors, the works of Astrid Lindgren, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Henrich Boll, Knut Hamsun and Boris Vian. She was interviewed for a documentary film based on her life, which became one of the most popular television programmes in Russias history in 2009.

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