Bookshelf

Die stille Macht der Frauen. Elena Chizhova. Roman. Deutsche Erstausgabe, 2012

Ausgezeichnet mit dem russischen Booker-Prize. Aus d. Russ. übersetzt u. mit Anmerkungen versehen v. Dorothea Trottenberg.

Die stille Macht der Frauen
Leningrad in den 1960er-Jahren: Antonina zieht mit ihrer kleinen Tochter Susanna in eine unfreiwillige Gemeinschaftswohnung mit drei alten Damen. Doch Susanna spricht nicht ein gefährlicher Makel in der Sowjetgesellschaft: Ihr droht die Einweisung ins Heim. Die Damen nehmen den Kampf mit der Staatsmacht auf...

Autoren-Porträt von Elena Chizhova:
Elena Chizhova, 1957 in Leningrad geboren, studierte Wirtschaftswissenschaften und war an der Universität und in der freien Wirtschaft tätig, bevor sie sich Mitte der 1990er Jahre dem Schreiben zuwandte. Ihre Romane wurden mehrfach ausgezeichnet. Elena Chizhova ist Vorsitzende der Sankt-Petersburger Sektion des PEN-Clubs.

Dorothea Trottenberg, studierte Slavistik in Köln und Leningrad, arbeitet u.a. als Bibliothekarin an der Universitätsbibliothek Basel und lebt als freie Übersetzerin klassischer und zeitgenössischer russischer Literatur, u. a. von Michail Bulgakov, Nikolaj Gogol, Vladimir Sorokin, Maria Rybakova, Boris Akunin, in Zürich. 2012 wurde Dorothea Trottenberg der "Paul-Celan-Preis" für ihr übersetzerisches Gesamtwerk verliehen.

About the author

Nadia Sikorsky

Nadia Sikorsky was born and raised in Moscow. She graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University and went on to complete her postgraduate studies there, earning a PhD in History. She spent 13 years at UNESCO, first in Paris and then in Geneva. After serving as Director of Communications at Green Cross International, founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, she launched NashaGazeta.ch in 2007, Switzerland’s first Russian-language online daily newspaper.

In 2022, Nadia Sikorsky was named to Le Temps’ Forum des 100, which brings together individuals who, in the newspaper’s view, have “significantly contributed to the success of French-speaking Switzerland”, from across public life, business, politics, science and culture.

After 18 years at the helm of NashaGazeta.ch, Nadia Sikorsky decided to devote herself to what had always held a special place in her work as a journalist: culture in all its diversity. This led to the creation of Russian Accent, a trilingual cultural blog in Russian, French and English, born in the heart of Europe, in Switzerland, which has become her second home and whose multiculturalism and multilingualism have helped shape the character of this new project.

At the heart of the project is the perspective of a European of Russian origin, drawing on more than 35 years of professional experience and a deep knowledge of both cultural traditions. Nadia Sikorsky sees her role as that of a cultural mediator between the two. The title of the blog, Russian Accent, reflects this idea: the accent is neither a linguistic barrier nor a political position, but a distinctive cultural imprint within a European context.

Events
Most read

A new book by the Geneva-based Slavist Jean-Philippe Jaccard and his Russian colleague Andrei Ustinov, now living in San Francisco, has been published by the European University at St Petersburg: Vzir Zaumi. Daniil Harms and the Literary Avant-Garde of the 1920s. In the authors' own words, the volume offers a kind of X-ray of Leningrad's "left-wing " circles and their evolution during the period between Harms's poetic debut and the creation of OBERIU, as well as the dynamics that shaped those circles.

A few days ago, the Lausanne-based publisher Éditions Noir sur Blanc brought out Guzel Yakhina’s novel about the celebrated Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. French readers will be able to read it in Maud Mabillard’s translation and, importantly, in full, including the ninth chapter omitted from the Russian edition.