Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR

Kurt Vonnegut’s cult following in the Soviet Union At the height of the Cold War, an Indiana University graduate student carried novels by the American author Kurt Vonnegut to the Soviet Union. The books were translated into Russian, Ukrainian, and other languages, and freely published in the USSR. Soviet censors only lightly touched Vonnegut's prose, and he was a favorite of Soviet hipsters, nerdy science types, and minor dissidents alike. In 1976, a theatrical production based on the novel Slaughterhouse-Five sold out three times at the Soviet Army Theater in Moscow. Why was Vonnegut a favored author in the land of Lenin, cherished equally by readers, critics, and Communist Party functionaries? Sarah D. Phillips, anthropologist and author of Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR, will discuss the remarkable story of Vonnegut’s cult status in the USSR in conversation with Stanford University scholar Dominick Lawton. The conversation will examine the unique contexts around an author and his readers and how cultural dialogue can survive even in the bleakest of conditions. Sarah D. Phillips is a writer, translator, and professor of anthropology at Indiana University-Bloomington with wide-ranging interests. She has published two books and many articles on women’s and disabled people’s movements in contemporary Ukraine. When Phillips isn’t geeking out over Russian and Ukrainian translations of Vonnegut in the 1970s, she’s either gardening or teaching classes on medical anthropology, care studies, and the anthropology of Saint Dolly Parton. Dominick Lawton is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He writes and teaches about literature under state socialism in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia, and the cultural ties between these places and the larger world. Naturally, his enthusiasm for these topics began in St. Louis, Missouri, right around the time he also discovered Kurt Vonnegut. He lives in San Francisco.