Research Focus Group Talk: All the Frost Melts: A Trilingual Reading in Dolgan, Russian, and English

This trilingual reading of writings by Indigenous writer Kseniia Bolshakova will include portions from her autobiographical novel All the Frost Melts, which was recently translated into English after being published in Dolgan and Russian in 2024. It will feature writer Kseniia Bolshakova reading in Dolgan, linguist Karina Sheifer (UC Santa Barbara) reading in Russian, and translator Ainsley Morse (UC San Diego) reading in English. The reading also will include imagery from life in the Russian Arctic. This event is being held in conjunction with INT 94LE: Literature and Experience and the longstanding California Graduate Slavic Colloquium, being held at UCSB for the first time ever on April 18, 2026.

Kseniia Bolshakova is an Indigenous decolonial writer and a member of the Dolgan Tribal community Yjdyŋa. She was born and raised in the tundra and the village of Popigai in the Russian Arctic. As one of the youngest keepers of the Dolgan language—spoken by only 1000 people—she is deeply committed to preserving her native tongue and traditional knowledge, as well as advocating for Indigenous rights and social justice. Her debut novel, Buluus da irer / All The Frost Melts, was first published in a bilingual Dolgan-Russian edition and presented at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York in 2024.

Karina Sheifer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at UCSB. Her fieldwork focuses on language contact and change as well as documentation and digitalization of Indigenous languages of Siberia and the Far East, namely Northern Tungusic (Evenki and Even), Siberian Turkic (Dolgan and Yakut), and Chukotko-Kamchatkan (Itelmen and Chukchi). Although her main research interest is in linguistics, an integral part of her work is an interaction with minority national communities in terms of education and promotion of Indigenous languages, literatures, and cultures.

Ainsley Morse teaches in the Department of Literature 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. With Anastasiya Osipova, she co-runs Cicada Press, a small press that publishes Eastern European and Russian poetry in translation; she also translates and edits for Tamizdat Project Press.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group, Arnhold Arts and Humanities Commons, and Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies