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Sergei Roy (b. 1936): journalist, writer, translator.

In my student days I began a career in writing, translating poetry from English into Russian and the other way, and also writing short stories. But this career was cut short by the attentions of censors who took it in their heads to squash me as a representative of the trend known in the 1950s  as stilyagi (something like "fops," "dandies"). I had very little to do with that crowd, actually disliked them, but that was impossible to prove once the officials labeled one with something they could understand.  So I stopped all attempts to publish my stuff, though I continued writing both poetry and prose all my life "for the bottom drawer." The Russian expression is pisat' v stol "write for the desk" - a well-known exercise among "internal émigrés" until the mid 1980s.

I switched to a career in theoretical linguistics, publishing some 60 papers and four monographs over some 20 years. Intellectual curiosity took me far beyond linguistics proper into such fields as theory of probability and mathematical statistics, information theory, mathematical logic (at one time I attended lectures and seminars on algorithms and recursive functions at a Physics and Mathematics Department), psycholinguistics, etc. Apart from a few publications, these studies did not affect my outward career much, although at the time the process afforded me distinct intellectual enjoyment.

In terms of tenure, I served as Associate Professor and head of departments of English Philology at a number of provincial higher educational establishments, which taught me a few things about handling other human beings - always a difficult job for an introvert. Towards the end of the 70s, no longer able to contain my disgust with the shenanigans so rife in the academic jungle (in which Party officials played a lusty role), I gave up my academic career for freelancing, mostly as translator.

I had had some experience doing translation jobs for Moscow publishers, so the transition was not too hard.  In the years that followed I translated dozens of books from Russian into English (sometimes from French or German into English) - prose, poetry, philosophy, linguistics, aesthetics, mathematical logic, literary theory and criticism, psychology, systems analysis, and God knows what else.

Of the poetic translations, most memorable are books and separate poems by Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Vysotsky, Boris Pasternak, Iosif Brodsky, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and many, too many others, poets and pseudo-poets. The translations appeared partly in volume form, partly in the then widely known Soviet Literature magazine. That journal also published some of my prose translations, such as The Last Pastoral by the late Ales Adamovich, whom I came to know fairly well. I still have somewhere in my archives an unpublished script about the Chernobyl disaster for a film he planned to produce together with Stanley Cramer.

Since about age 14, when I first read Plekhanov's book on the monistic view of history, I had a penchant for philosophy, especially the Greeks, and at one time studied the subject rather systematically. That was the reason why, decades later, I willingly took up translation, for Progress Publishers, of works by Evald Ilyenkov, Merab Mamardashvili, Aleksei F. Losev, and other fine philosophers. I also translated a few of the lesser known works of Marx and Engels from German and French into English for their Complete Works (it was then being published in London), and half of Volume Four of the Complete Works of Georgy Plekhanov.

I must say that these jobs brought one true intellectual contentment. For this, however, I sometimes had to translate, on the quid pro quo principle, piles of trash, like a volume entitled Historical Materialism, which I mentally christened the biggest collection of lies between two covers. An 800-page long textbook of Marxist philosophy by a certain gentleman called Spirkin was in the same vein. There must have been other stuff which I, thank God, have by now forgotten.

In the post-Perestroika period I published numerous short stories, features, articles and reviews, mostly in English, in such magazines as Moscow Guardian (defunct), Glas, Moscow Magazine (twice defunct), Capital Perspective (defunct), Russian Life, Perspective, and in Moscow's English-language papers: The Moscow Times, Moscow News, Moscow Tribune (defunct).

In 1995-2003, with interruptions, I published, on a weekly basis, essays on the history of Perestroika in the Moscow News; general title, Collapse of the Colossus (that title was the last choice; in the course of the publication there were others). In this way a rather bulky volume accumulated. I never made any attempts to publish it, though some interest was displayed both by specialists and laymen. I am still working on it, on and off.

All my life I hiked a great deal, did some mountaineering (until a bad fall some time in the sixties), and generally went in for escapism in a big way. I covered most of the Soviet Union, sailed all over the Caspian, the Aral, and other places, mostly solo, and much preferring the wilder, pristine areas (what is in Russian known as nenaselenka "uninhabited areas"). In the process, I accumulated heaps of diaries or better say logs.

Some of these made the basis of a tale of adventure (rather, an undersized novel) entitled Taiga Law. Originally written in English as a short story, it sort of swelled to larger proportions in the process of translation, and the English text was rewritten accordingly. It was printed in 2002.

The novel Solo on the Aral followed the same pattern. Written in English in 1994 over a period of some three months, it took some twelve years to be translated into Russian, swelling in the process to some 500+ pages. It was eventually published in 2007 in Russian by the Evrasia+ Publishers (available at www.vosres.info ). I do not believe I will ever be able to re-translate it into English - there are lots of other things to do first.

The post-Perestroika years brought several editorial jobs in succession. For a while I served as deputy editor-in-chief of the Soviet Union's first glossy, Moscow Magazine, published in English and Russian. In 1995 the magazine perished through penury after being forsaken by its founder Derk Sauer, the current owner of a publishing empire in Russia. I felt sorry for its demise, it was a good enough magazine, quite artistic, and the content was OK - we did our best.

Then for ten years, 1995-2004, I was chief editor of the Moscow News weekly. Before my arrival MN was a sorry sight indeed, even if I say so myself - a collection of ridiculous, garbled English translations of articles from the Russian sister paper Moskovskie Novosti. I made it into a far more independent publication. My motives in doing so were varied; part of the reason was that I drifted away from the ideology and, most importantly, from the political line of radical liberalism characteristic of the "democrats of the first wave," of whom I was in fact one.

After MN was sold, in 2003, to Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin, the YUKOS oligarchs (there was a cover-up, but the actual owners were these individuals), I continued to work for a few months in my former capacity. I was not fired on the spot, as was Victor Loshak, chief editor of the Russian paper, but it was clear to me from the start that I would not be able to work along with the new management (such as the well-known TV killer Yevgeny Kiselev). So in the end I quietly sent in my resignation by email and left the paper that I regarded as a sort of my brainchild. That was sad, of course, but one had to be realistic - they would have squeezed me out without fail, and I would be lucky to escape with my life; the pressure was picayune but relentless, and my heart, which by that time had a couple of bypasses thrown into it, was not up to it.

For a few months I felt as free as the wind, and even put in a couple of memorable trips, paddling down the Vetluga in Russia's north and the Akhtuba in the south, all in one season, but was soon recruited as editor of the English language webzine www.intelligent.ru (2005-2006). It is still referred to in various blogs as "defunct but fondly remembered." The circumstances of its death are too nasty to be remembered.

From January 2007 to the present, editor of  www.guardian-psj.ru .

That's it, in brief. A great many details of my life I have put into Taiga Law and Solo on the Aral, and into my short stories and travelogues, which I recommend to anyone interested enough.

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