The startlingly innovative unofficial Soviet-era poet Yan Satunovsky (1913-1982) was born to a Jewish family in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro in Ukraine), in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. Although his family was primarily Russian rather than Yiddish-speaking, he grew up in a patently multilingual environment, traces of which would appear in his poems throughout his nearly fifty years of writing. This talk focuses on the translingual aspects of Satunovsky's poetics, with particular attention to his work for children, published in the 1960s and 1970s in the official Soviet press. Dr. Ainsley Morse will examine the way Satunovsky’s multilingual preoccupations—especially a persistent tension in relation to the Russian language—dovetails curiously with the imperatives of post-war Soviet internationalism as packaged for children. 

Ainsley Morse teaches in the Literature department at UC-San Diego and translates from Russian, Ukrainian and the languages of former Yugoslavia. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, particularly unofficial or "underground" poetry, as well as the avant-garde, children's literature and contemporary poetry. Recent publications include the Yugoslav surrealist-Marxist Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang (with Aleksandar Bošković, Brill 2022); the Odesan poet Maria Galina’s Communiqués (with Anna Halberstadt, Cicada Press 2024) and the novels of early Leningrad modernist Konstantin Vaginov (with Geoff Cebula, NYRB Classics, 2025). She was poetry translations editor for Ukrainian Soviet Modernism: Texts and Contexts (ed. Babak, Ilchuk, Ustinov; ASP, 2025) and is currently working on a collection of poems by Yan Satunovsky.