Diana Lewis Burgin American translator, literary critic and poet Date of Birth: 03.08.1943 Country: USA

Biography of Diana Lewis Burgin

Diana Lewis Burgin was an American translator, literary scholar, and poet. She was born to a Russian violinist, Richard Burgin, and a violinist, Ruth Posseult. Burgin completed her dissertation on "The Literary Ballad in the Symbolist Period" at Harvard University in 1973.

For over 30 years, Burgin served as a professor at Boston University. She made significant contributions to English translations of Russian literature, including Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" (Ardist, 1995; Vintage International, 1996) and Sergey Dovlatov's "The Invisible Book" (Ardist, 1979). She also translated Korney Chukovsky's book "Alexander Blok as Man and Poet" (Ardis, 1982) in collaboration with Katherine O'Connor, as well as poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Sophia Parnok, Valentin Parnakh, and Kseniya Nekrasova.

Burgin authored the monograph "Sophia Parnok: The Life and Work of Russia's Sappho" (1994) and numerous articles on Russian literature. Two collections of her articles were published in Russian: "Marina Tsvetaeva and Transgressive Eros" (St. Petersburg: INAPRESS, 2000) and "Beyond Ordinary Life: Russian Women" (St. Petersburg: INAPRESS, 2004). As a literary scholar, Burgin embraced a feminist approach and paid special attention to gender aspects in the lives and works of the authors she analyzed. This perspective often garnered sharp criticism from Russian critics, who claimed that her work deviated from traditional literary analysis. However, academic scholars also acknowledged the quality of Burgin's Russian texts and her analytical framework.

In addition to her scholarly contributions, Burgin published a novel in verse titled "Richard Burgin: A Life in Verse" (1988), which was a fictionalized biography of her father written in the style of Eugene Onegin stanza.