On 20 November at the apartment under surveillance at the above-cited address an unidentified person perpetrated deposit of a standard legal-size paper envelope bearing neither mailing nor return address.
Victor Martinovich was born in Oshmiany, Belarus. His novel, Paranoia—a best seller in Russia, banned in Belarus—received a 2011 PEN award for its forthcoming translation by Diane Nemec Ignashev. Paranoia will be published in 2012 by Northwestern University Press. Martinovich’s previously published work includes Political Parties in Belarus as a Necessary Element of Civic Society, as well as contributions to the Belarusian weekly, BelGazeta. His story, “Taboo,” appeared in Best European Short Stories 2011, edited by Aleksandar Hemon.
Diane Nemec Ignashev is Class of 1941 Professor of Russian and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College, where she teaches Russian culture, cinema studies, gender studies, and an occasional workshop in translation. Her published translations include works by twentieth-century Russian writers, most recently the memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva’s daughter, Ariadna Efron: Unforced Labors (2006) and No Love without Poetry (2009). No Love without Poetry, published by Northwestern University Press, has won the 2011 award for Best Translation into English (scholarly volume) by the American Association for Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. At present she is hard at work on the translation of Victor Martinovich’s Paranoia, for which she received a PEN America translation grant (2011). Her current research is a book on the films of Aleksandr Sokurov.
