During her academic career, Kulthum cAwdah rose to the rank of professor of Arabic language and literature at Moscow State University and, along with the outstanding Russian academic and fellow collaborator, Ignaty Krachkovsky, helped to instigate early scholarly research of modern Arabic literature outside the Arab world by introducing authors such as Amin Rihani and Tawfiq Hakim to Russian readers. In spite of this, Kulthum cAwdah’s contribution to the study of modern Arabic literature is little researched and understood outside Russia. As a student in the Beit Jala Seminary run by the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, cAwdah translated short works of Russian literature into Arabic that were then published in Khalil Baydas’ innovative literary journal, al-Nafa’is al-casriyyah. After marrying a Russian doctor and initially moving to Kronstadt, cAwdah eventually began her academic career at St Petersburg, where she worked closely with Krachkovsky and published several volumes on modern Arabic literature and Arabic language. Kulhum cAwdah’s life and intellectual trajectory were highly complex because of political contexts and the cultural environments in which she found herself. Ill health and imprisonment meant that cAwdah had to negotiate her way around a multitude of impediments to deliver her work to her Soviet readership and, as her correspondence reveals, her private life often entailed having to traverse the boundaries of cultural expectations. Drawing upon theories of translation that concentrate on interaction between both cultures and texts, such as Apter and Damrosch, this paper shall argue that cAwdah’s life and works necessitated processes of translation that prompted a dialogue between a number of different world-views and saw her occupy a liminal space between Russia and the Arab world. The paper shall examine how cAwdah became pivotal to the dialogue between the two cultures by translating across languages and times and offering a unique perspective on the Arab world in the Soviet Union. We shall see how her perception of modern Arabic literature was identifiable within her published works, such as her anthology of Lebanese writings, and what this conveys to us about changing Russian and Arab identities in the early twentieth century.