The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar

The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, a novel by Yury Tynyanov, a leading figure of the Russian formalist school, describes the final year in the life of Alexander Griboedov, the author of the comedy Woe from Wit. As ambassador to Persia, Griboedov was savagely murdered in Tehran in 1829 in an attack on the Russian embassy.

Rush Anna Kurkina :

Anna Rush has a PhD in Russian Studies from the University of St Andrews. She is the co-translator with her husband Dr. Christopher Rush of Tynianov's Young Pushkin (Angel Books, London, 2007, American edition, Rookery Press, New York, 2008).Yury Tynyanov (1894–1943) was an influential literary historian, critic, translator, and theoretician of the cinema. He was a leading member of the formalist school of literary theory before achieving renown as a writer of historical fiction. His works include two other literary biographical novels, on Pushkin and Küchelbecker, as well as several shorter works of historical fiction.

Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush previously translated Tynyanov’s Young Pushkin: A Novel (2007).

Harsha Ram, author of The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire:
Tynyanov’s novel transforms the life of writer-diplomat Alexander Griboedov into the death of the author as such, dispersed discursively even as he is dismembered physically, through bureaucratic manipulation, high-society intrigue, diplomatic complicity, and social oblivion. This book recasts the familiar story of the martyred Russian writer, anticipating by a century the fate of Soviet intellectuals whose life and work would be subsumed by the state.

Peter Steiner, author of Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics:
Together with Shklovsky and Jakobson, Tynyanov was the face of Russian formalism—the premier student of Romanticism. His historical novels draw on the extensive wealth of archival materials he acquired as a critic. Tynyanov’s novel is a must-read!

Sibelan Forrester, translator of Vladimir Propp’s The Russian Folktale:
The well-known formalist literary scholar Yury Tynyanov was a master of form. In bracing prose style, his novel The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar dives deeply into the life of the Russian poet Alexander Griboedov and Russian cultural and political history. This translation by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush brings the reader every unexpected turn of Griboedov’s life and thoughts.