07/02/2025 16:00 Sala Quetzal de La Biblioteca

Global Relations in 2025 - A Speakers Series | From Russian with Love: Poetry as a Guide to the Russian Mind from Pushkin to Putin

By Richard Lourie

During this winter we’ll offer a speakers series.

Your ticket is a donation to La Biblioteca, get it here.

Tickets available at the Box Office with cash donation

In February, Richard Lourie will present his book of poems My Only Crime, 64 years after being awarded the Sneath Poetry Prize by Robert Lowell (1960).

 

He had been waylaid by Russia. Himself born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three of his grandparents and his father were born in the Russian empire.

 

No Russian, except for the occasional curse, was spoken at his home. But tales of Russian life stimulated him sufficiently to get a Ph. D.in Slavic Languages and Literatures.

 

Ultimately, he would translate more than thirty books from Russian and Polish.

 

Friday, February 7th | 4:00 pm

Sala Quetzal in La Biblioteca

$280 pesos 10% cash discount

IN ENGLISH

All proceeds benefiting La Biblioteca

Richard Lourie’s translations include VISIONS FROM SAN FRANCISCO BAY by Czeslaw Milosz, MEMOIRS by Andrei Sakharov, THE LIFE AND EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF PRIVATE IVAN CHONKIN by Vladimir Voinovich and MY CENTURY by Aleksander Wat.

 

He has published eleven books of his own including the novels: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH STALIN, ZERO GRAVITY, FIRST LOYALTY and A HATRED FOR TULIPS. Among his non-fiction works are SAKHAROV: A BIOGRAPHY, PUTIN: HIS DOWNFALL AND RUSSIA’S COMING CRASH, HUNTING THE DEVIL (a true-crime account of a Russian serial killer) and  RUSSIA SPEAKS: AN ORAL HISTORY FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE PRESENT.

 

He is currently at work on a second book of poems which he intends to finish in half the time it took him for his first.

We want to see you at La Biblioteca!