David Wells

David Wells is a Perth-based Russian literature specialist and librarian. He has published on many aspects of Russian literature with a particular focus on poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Current research interests include eighteenth-century contacts between Russia and Japan, the emergence of the Russian symbolist movement, and the literature of the Crimean War. His most recent book is The Russian Discovery of Japan 1670–1800 (Routledge, 2020).

David Wells reviews 'Russia Is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War' edited by Maria Bloshteyn

January–February 2021, no. 428 • 17 December 2020

The invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in 1941 caused massive destruction over a huge area. The number of deaths is uncertain, though a figure of around twenty-seven million is now widely accepted. The lives of many more millions were affected – as soldiers, as workers in war-related industries, as civilians in besieged and occupied territories, as refugees – and the experience of ha ... (read more)

David Wells reviews 'The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry' edited by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski

November 2015, no. 376 • 29 October 2015

Translation is all about choice: which authors will be attractive to the target audience? Which texts by those authors will be of interest? Which aspects of those texts should be emphasised? How can ambiguities in the original be preserved or resolved? What relative weight should be given to formal and semantic elements? Historically, the translation of Russian literature into English has often fo ... (read more)