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Winner of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 2011 Book Prize for Best Scholarly Translation in English

The memoirs of Ariadna Efron provide an intimate and indispensable perspective on the poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s life and work, told from the point of view of her daughter. This wrenching story about the difficulty of living with genius charts Efron’s relationship with her parents as they navigate art and exile.

Efron’s rapport with her mother, already intense, became strained under the hardships imposed by early twentieth century Russian political upheaval. Efron recounts the family’s travels from Moscow to Germany, to Czechoslovakia, and finally to France, where, against her mother’s advice, Efron decided to return to Russia. Diane Nemec Ignashev draws on Efron’s short stories and her mother’s notebooks to supplement the original memoirs. Haunting and poignant, No Love without Poetry completes extant historical records on Tsvetaeva—and showcases Efron as a literary force in her own right.

Immediately banned after it was published, Paranoia is a novel about how dictatorships survive by burrowing into the minds of those they rule, sowing distrust and blurring the boundaries between the state’s and the individual’s autonomy. Although Minsk and Belarus are never mentioned, they are clearly the author’s inspiration for the novel’s setting. The plot focuses on a doomed romance between a young man whose former lover has disappeared and a young woman whose other lover is the minister of state security. The novel evokes classic dissident literature while artfully depicting the post-Soviet, globalized world.