Gwangju professor shares Russian book honor

A Gwangju-based American professor is one of three authors of a book that recently won a Russian award.

The Russian Fund of National Education Development gave laureates’ prizes to Chonnam National University’s Doug Stuber, Ivan Kuznetsov of Novisibirsk State University and Elena Katyshevtseva of Izhevsk State Technical University for “Modern Russian History,” printed by Chonnam University Press last year.

The fund issues prizes each year in four areas: humanities, technical sciences, economics and administration, and law. This year, 500 books were awarded in all categories, from a short list of some 5,000 entries.

The textbook is a concise rundown of Russian history from 1917 to 2010 in less than 200 pages. Stuber said there was a deliberate decision to keep it short, but it was tough to edit the book down to that length while retaining all the necessary information. He added that the other strength of the book was its balance of Western and Russian viewpoints.

“The research involved is evenly split between Russian and Western experts. It’s about half U.K. and U.S. and half Russian, so it gives us a fairly balanced approach to history, which is quite rare when it comes to the history of Russia,” he said.

Stuber said that the prize meant that a second printing of the book was now likely.

The prize had also increased the opportunities for ties between Chonnam University and Russian colleges, particularly Izhevsk State Technical University, he said. He added that other Russian authors had expressed interest in publishing through Chonnam since the award.

Stuber became involved in producing the books after Katyshevtseva’s daughter asked him about opportunities for her mother to do research in Korea. Katyshevtseva spent two summers at Chonnam teaching and researching and is back in Korea for research this year.

Unlike the other two authors, who are history professors, Stuber is a professor of English, but the award seems to have opened doors for Stuber in his own field.

Stuber, who has 14 volumes of published poetry, will now have some of his poetry translated into Russian.

“It will be the sixth language my poems have been translated into,“ he said. “Russia is a literary place, and the students hesitated to translate an American’s poems, but once they read enough they were excited to do it.”

The award will be issued in a ceremony in Moscow in September.

The authors are planning a second book together on the history of imperial Russia.

By Paul Kerry (paulkerry@heraldcorp.com)