Zsuzsa Hetényi

Zsuzsa Hetényi’s teaching career began in the University of Budapest (ELTE) in 1983, where she has been full professor of Russian since 2007. In addition to a monograph on the biblical, mythical, and messianic motifs of Babel’s Red Cavalry (1991), she edited and co-authored a two-volume History of Russian Literature (1997; 2002). Her In a Maelstrom: A History of Russian-Jewish Prose (2000, English version: 2008) was the first concise monograph on the topic. More recently, her monumental Nabokov regényösvényein (On the Tracks of Nabokov’s Novels, 2015) explored the inner coherence of Nabokov’s oeuvre. Her latest book in Hungarian is a two-volume manual for developing skills in the analysis and interpretation of literary texts (“What Are those Books About?”: Keys to Literary Interpretation, 2020). Beginning in 1986 with a samizdat version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, she has translated a wide range of works from Russian into Hungarian, including Babel’s 1920 Diary, Vladimir Voinovich’s Private Ivan Chonkin, prose by Daniil Kharms and Joseph Brodsky, and the novels Mary and Glory by Nabokov, along with many of his stories.