Freedom Letters and the Books It Could Print
A close look at Freedom Letters, founded in 2023, and the specific titles it has published — writers who cannot place work inside Russia.
Presses that work now
Photo: Ron Lach / Pexels
The catalogue
moved abroad
Freedom Letters, Vidim Books and Babel Books publish in Russian from outside Russia. Inside it, the foreign-agent rules and the 2023 extremism designation decide what a shop may stock.
What the translator does
The Argument About Pevear and Volokhonsky
A decades-long dispute over the most prominent translation partnership in Russian literature turns on three specific charges — and on what the passages themselves reveal.
Read the pieceThe defence of Pevear and Volokhonsky tends to come from two directions.
From the piece
Presses and advocates this site stands with.
Presses
Translation
Where the printing happens now
Vidim Books: Small Press, Large Mandate
A small exile imprint with a distinct curatorial logic — not rescue publishing, but selection.
Presses that work now
Babel Books, Tel Aviv: A Catalogue in Three Languages
A small press in Israel's Russian-speaking capital publishes work that can no longer appear in Moscow — in Russian, Hebrew, and English at once.
Presses that work nowWhat the translator does
What Constance Garnett Settled and What She Left Open
Garnett translated roughly seventy volumes of Russian literature into English between 1892 and 1934 — this piece examines the choices that became defaults and the passages that later translators went back to correct.
Robert Chandler on Two Untranslatable Writers
Robert Chandler's translation work on Andrei Platonov and Vasily Grossman — the specific problems each writer posed and the published solutions, drawing on Chandler's own notes and introductions.
Two Translators, Two Methods
Marian Schwartz and Oliver Ready have both translated major Russian prose into English — and their working principles point in opposite directions.
The books that crossed over
Life and Fate: Four Decades of English-Language Publication
Which Master and Margarita Are You Reading?
Crime and Punishment, Four Times Over
Feltrinelli, 1957: How Doctor Zhivago Was First Published
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: The Novy Mir Issue and After
We, 1924: The Book That Reached English Before Russian
How censorship was built
Samizdat and Tamizdat as Documented Practice
Clandestine text in the Soviet Union was not a metaphor for resistance — it was a set of specific physical operations, each with its own material constraints and documented failure modes.
Glavlit: The Office That Read Everything First
The Soviet censorship authority that controlled every printed word from 1922 until the USSR's collapse operated through bureaucratic routine, not spectacular banning — which made it more effective, not less.
Two Nobels, Two Outcomes
The Soviet state treated its two great Nobel laureates differently — and the difference was not accidental.
Where the presses are
The kit’s geometry covers these four countries. Presses and shops in Berlin, London, Milan and Moscow appear in the pieces themselves rather than on a drawn map.