The Shapes of Exile: Ovid in Russian Literary Imagination

Dr. Zara Torlone (Miami University) will deliver a lecture titled "The Shapes of Exile: Ovid in Russian Literary Imagination" on October 14th at 5:00pm at the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies (1134 W. 11th St.).

For Russian poets Ovid was an archetypal exile through whom they interpreted their own complex relationship with their motherland. This talk unearths some of the texts and contexts surrounding the narrative of exile in three Russian poets (Pushkin, Mandelshtam, Brodsky) by delving into the archaeology of the national poetic memory as it is reflected in the cultural poetics of each poet.

Zara Martirosova Torlone is a Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures and a member of the Core Faculty at the Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. She received her B.A. in Classical Philology from Moscow University in Russia and her Ph.D. in Classics from Columbia University in New York. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (Duckworth and Bloomsbury, 2009), Latin Love Poetry (IB Tauris and Oxford University Press, co-authored, 2014), and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (Oxford University Press, 2015). She also authored articles on Roman poetry and novel, Russian reception of antiquity, Roman games, and textual criticism. Her most recent publications are a co-edited volume on Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe to which she also contributed (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and a co-edited volume (with Susanna Braund) Virgil’s Translators with two of her own contributions (Oxford University Press, 2018). The latter volume was awarded the 2020 McKay prize from the Vergilian Society. Her latest publications include a special issue (with Susanna Braund) for Classical Reception Journal ((Oxford, 2022) on failed translations of Vergil and a co-edited volume (with Giampiero Scafoglio) “Dido Unbound: The Queen of Carthage before, in, and after Vergil” (Brill, 2026). Her current book project is entitled Shapes of Exile: Ovid in Russian Literary Imagination.

This talk is sponsored by The Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Dept. of Slavic, German, & Eurasian Studies, Max Kade Center for German-American Studies, the Hall Center for the Humanities, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, and the Department of Classics.