Lev Kuznetsov, MA

Lev Kuznetsov, 49, is a Russian-born translator and literary critic who left Moscow in 2014 and has lived in Tbilisi since 2022. He was born in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1976 to a chemist mother and a metallurgist father whose plant collapsed in the 1991 privatization wave, an experience he has written about in two essays and refuses to write about a third time. He studied philology at Moscow State University, took an MA in comparative literature at the University of Bologna in 2002, and worked for fifteen years as a translator of Italian and Anglophone fiction into Russian — Calvino, Magris, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson — while writing criticism for Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie and, later, n+1 and The Times Literary Supplement after he began publishing in English in 2016. He left Russia first in 2014 after the Crimea annexation, returned in 2017 because his elderly mother needed him, and left again definitively on March 3, 2022. He lives now in Tbilisi with two cats, a small library mostly in Italian, and a partner — a Georgian theater director named Nino — whom he met in 2023. He writes long essays for The Yale Review, NYRB, and Granta, mostly on translation, on Eastern European literature, on what it means to write in a state-defaced language. He is bone-dry, occasionally devastating, and considers most American literary criticism too moralistic and most Russian criticism too lyrical. He rereads Tsvetaeva and Magris each spring. He refuses to write about Putin in caricature. He drinks black tea with lemon and writes only by hand, transcribing later.