Since the war in Ukraine started, criticism against Russia has thrived and it goes beyond the field of politics. In the arts, debates have addressed the necessity to boycott Russian culture (in 2025, Victoire Feuillebois published a book on whether Pushkin should be “cancelled”, Faut-il brûler Pouchkine?) or, on the contrary, to support Russian artists who, very often, do not agree with Vladimir Putin’s politics, so much so that one could wonder, with Gisèle Sapiro (Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ? 2020), if it is possible to separate Russian works of art from the Russian leader. Moreover, the conflict has had repercussions that extend to the use of language. Thus, in English, many people insist that the Ukrainian capital should be spelled Kyiv rather than Kiev, while this debate hardly exists in French. On that topic, one could wonder if the translator can make a political choice by favouring one spelling over the other (and the same goes with choices in vocabulary).

For this one-day seminar, scholars are invited to look at the way Russian (hi)stories can be narrated when the Russian language is both eluded and questioned, and they are invited to do so through the prism of translation between English and French.

In literature, one can think of authors who wrote on the Cold War such as John Le Carré (starting with The Russia House, his novels were translated into French by Mimi and Isabelle Perrin, and then by the latter alone). It is also possible to study Russian- or Soviet-born authors such as Vladimir Nabokov and Gary Shteyngart, who both wrote abundantly in English and have several translators in French. Even more recently, Russian-speaking Ukrainian authors have made the decision to write in English: for example, Sana Krasikov won the French award “Prix du premier roman étranger” for her novel The Patriots (2017), translated into French by Sarah Gurcel; likewise, Andrey Kurkov wrote his fiction in Russian and his non-fiction in Ukrainian, but his last two books on the war were composed directly in English, and those were translated into French (the first one by Johann Bihr, the second one by Bihr and Odile Demange). And from French into English, one could look at the novels by Andreï Makine which were translated into English (by Geoffrey Strachan).

Screen media can also be studied through the angle of translation: for example, in the series The Americans (2013-2018), two spies from the KGB are under cover in the USA but they almost never speak Russian, since the language would betray them. More recently, French author Giuliano da Empoli’s book Le Mage du Kremlin (The Wizard of the Kremlin, Willard Wood) was adapted into a movie by Olivier Assayas and Emmanuel Carrère: the two directors are French, but the movie is in English, with Jude Law playing Putin. Older movies can be studied too, for instance Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939) or Mission to Moscow (Curtiz, 1943). 

In history, one could analyze the role played by translation when it comes to exploring and exploiting archives abroad, or when it comes to writing monographs on Russian politics or history. There is also the question of the translator’s specialization: for a book on the history of Russia, is it better to choose an experienced translator or a specialist of the country? The French translation of Alexey Navalny’s memoirs could be studied: why were they translated from the English and not from the Russian? Was it easier to have a relay translation? Or is it because the Russian version does not include the last hundred pages that exist in the English one and which directly address the Ukraine conflict in 2023 and 2024?