Cold War Women: Female Translators of Russian and Soviet Literature in the Twentieth Century

Presents original archival research on eight largely unknown émigrée translators whose work during the Cold War actively contributed to and, in some cases, decisively shaped the reception of Russian and Soviet literature throughout the English-speaking world.

In this open access volume, Cathy McAteer profiles female translators of Russian and Soviet literature into English during the last century, focusing on the UK, USSR and US. Through cultural mediation, most often translation, each woman represents a unique encounter with Cold War politics.

Drawing from extensive archival material, including British Intelligence files, reviews, publications and memoirs, Cold War Women sketches the microhistories of eight complex and occasionally controversial bilingual women: Moura Budberg, Vera Traill, Evelyn Manning, Margaret Wettlin, Violet Dutt, Edith Bone, Olga Carlisle, and Mirra Ginsburg. Many of these women, in addition to their work as translators and publishers of Soviet literature, led complex political lives that brought them under scrutiny for espionage, and even suspected assassination.

Cold War Women explores how literary translation became a uniquely enabling career for each of these women, both in personally challenging gender norms, and in showing translation's soft power for galvanizing propagandist and humanitarian change. The book thus rehabilitates forgotten but influential female translators of Russian literature whose contributions helped to shape the Anglophone reception of Russian and Soviet literature both during and beyond their fraught historical moment.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Exeter.