Ardis Publishing
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Ardis Publishing is an imprint owned by an American independent publisher Overlook Press. Ardis specializes in English translations of Russian literature. Considered to be the only publishing house outside of Russia dedicated to Russian literature, Ardis was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan by husband and wife scholars Carl R. Proffer and Ellendea C. Proffer in 1971.[1] The Proffers had two goals for Ardis: one was to publish in Russian the "lost library" of twentieth-century Russian literature which had been censored and removed from Soviet libraries (Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, among others); the other was to bring translations of contemporary writers working in the Soviet Union to the West.[1] Ardis has published around 400 titles, roughly half in English, half in Russian.
Ardis became important in the Soviet Union because it published, in Russian, many works which could not be published there until the dawn of Glasnost. Such authors as Nabokov, Sokolov, Brodsky, Bitov, Iskander, Aksyonov and many others published in Russian with Ardis, and the books were smuggled back into the Soviet Union. Besides publishing new translations of the classics as well as academic guides, notable publications such as the Russian Literature Triquarterly, and all but one of the main books of poetry by Brodsky, Carl Proffer facilitated Brodsky's coming to the United States, by assuring him of a job at the University of Michigan. Ardis was sold to The Overlook Press in 2002, which have begun reprinting selected titles of the Ardis back catalog, although they do not publish in the Russian language.
In English, Ardis published the complete letters of Dostoevsky, major prose collections of Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, and the only annotated translation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (now published by Vintage).
A professor at the University of Michigan, Carl R. Proffer died in 1984 of colon cancer at age 46. His wife Ellendea continued publishing and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989.
The name Ardis comes from the novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov. See: Ardis 25 years of Russian Literature, catalog for exhibit at the Library of Foreign literature, Moscow, May 28, 1996.
