Nina Chayka at LitHub:
Ann Arbor, MI, 1969. A Nabokov scholar and a Bulgakov scholar walk into a bar—a love story for the ages. By the time they founded Ardis two years later, he was thirty-two and a full professor, already three scholarly books deep in just a year—two on Gogol, one on Nabokov. She, twenty-seven, was an assistant professor of Russian herself.
Ellendea and Carl Proffer both came to Russian sideways, almost by accident. Carl was good-natured, tall but unimposing, beloved in their small department. Ellendea was poised and assured: in her interviews she speaks in a calm unaccented Russian, the best I’ve heard a foreigner speak. A year before founding Ardis, the couple spent six months in the Soviet Union, where they met poets, novelists, playwrights, widows of legendary dead writers. They met artists who worked as miners, night watchmen, boiler-room stokers by day, and by night sewed up their poems and plays, typed onto crumbling paper, into thin notebooks, bound by the string that held together kielbasa at the grocery store. The Proffers carried dozens of these manuscripts back to Michigan.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.