Dr Bryan Karetnyk

Bryan is one of our Bye–Fellows, teaching our undergraduate students on the MML course. He is also a Fellow of Murray Edwards College.

Biography

Bryan read Russian and Japanese at the University of Edinburgh, spending time in Moscow, St Petersburg and Tokyo. After a period working for the British Civil Service, he returned to academia as a graduate student at University College London, where his doctoral thesis examined the Russian diaspora’s artistic and cultural responses to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. He joined Cambridge as an affiliated lecturer in 2022 and has taught across all parts of the Slavonic Studies Tripos.

Bryan is also an award-winning translator, and his highly acclaimed translations from both Russian and Japanese bridge the possibilities of translation as both an artistic practice and a scholarly pursuit. His translations include major works by the likes of Gaito Gazdanov, Yuri Felsen, Boris Poplavsky and Irina Odoevtseva, and also by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. He is the editor and principal translator of the landmark Penguin anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017), and is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Spectator.

Teaching

Bryan teaches our undergraduates who specialise in Russian and Slavonic Studies across their course. He supervises SLA2: Translation from Russian into English, and Oral Russian and SLC1: Translation from and into Russian.

Research

Bryan's research interests lie broadly in Russian literature, music and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More specifically, he is interested in manifestations of these within the Russian diaspora, and their intersection with intellectual, political and cultural histories. Bryan is also a literary translator and combines this practice with more scholarly research.