[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.

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.

[2] In English, among many other titles, Ardis published the complete letters of Dostoevsky, major prose collections of Platonov, Remizov, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, and the only annotated translation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, as well as major histories of eighteenth-century literature and the most inclusive anthology of Romantic literature.

The archive of the original Ardis Publishers is now housed at the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan.