Word for Word: A Translator's Memoir of Literature, Politics, and Survival in Soviet Russia (Podstrochnik)

Lilianna Lungina is a renowned master of literary translation. Thanks to her, Russian readers came to know Astrid Lindgren's 'The Kid and Karlsson' and 'Pippi Longstocking,' as well as the novels of Hamsun, Strindberg, Böll, Simenon, Vian, and Ajar. As a child, she lived in France, Palestine, and Germany, and in the early 1930s, as a thirteen-year-old girl, she returned to her homeland, the USSR.

The life of this remarkable woman profoundly expressed the twentieth century. Her captivating oral novel combines a chronicle of a dramatic era with a confessional account of the life of the soul. M. Tsvetaeva, V. Nekrasov, D. Samoilov, A. Tvardovsky, A. Solzhenitsyn, V. Shalamov, E. Yevtushenko, N. Khrushchev, A. Sinyavsky, I. Brodsky, A. Lindgren - these are just some of the most famous heroes of her story, distant and close companions of her life, which she agreed to tell in front of the camera in Oleg Dorman's documentary.