Professor of Comparative Literature
Education: Cornell University (B.A., 1966, Russian Literature), University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D., 1980, Comparative Literature)
Research Interests: Russian 19th-century prose (especially Dostoevsky and Tolstoy), the Russian critical tradition (especially Bakhtin); Pushkin as prosewriter and playwright; Russian music and opera; Eastern and Central European prose; Russian spiritual philosophy
Courses taught (undergraduate): Survey of 19th century literature; Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Russians and the Devil; the 20th-c. Eastern European novel.
Courses taught (graduate): Evolution of Russian Prose; Russian Approaches to Literature and Culture (Formalists, Bakhtin, Cultural Semiotics); Tolstoy; 19th-20th c. Russian Novel of Ideas, Readings in Russian Philosophy
SLECTED PUBLICATIONS
Books:
Authored:
The Life of Musorgsky — Cambridge University Press, 1999.
The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin — Princeton University Press, 1997.
Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme — Indiana University Press, 1986.
Edited and/or translated:
Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin, Prentiss-Hall, 1999.
M. M Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics — University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (with Michael Holquist) — University of Texas Press, 1981.
Articles (selected):
"Artur Vincent Lourié's 'Blackamoor of Peter the Great': Pushkin's Exotic Ancestor as Twentieth-Century Opera" for Pushkin and Blackness, ed. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2004).
“Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Bakhtin’s vnenakhodimost’ (How distance serves an aesthetics of arousal and perception differently from an aesthetics based on pain),” Poetics Today, special issue on “Estrangement,” guest edited by Svetlana Boym (forthcoming 2004).
“Pushkin’s Andzhelo, Lotman’s Insight into it, and the Proper Measure of Politics and Grace,” in Andreas Schönle, Lotman and Cultural Studies (University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming 2005).
“Shostakovich and the Russian Literary Tradition,” in Laurel E. Fay, ed., Shostakovich and his World (Bard Music Festival / Princeton UP, 2004): 183-226.
“Zosima’s ‘Mysterious Visitor’: Again Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky on Heaven and Hell,” in Robert Louis Jackson, ed., A New Word on The Brothers Karamazov (Northwestern UP, 2003): 155-79.
"Little Tragedies, Little Operas," for Alexander Pushkin's Little Tragedies: The Poetics of Brevity, ed. Svetlana Evdokimova (Wisconsin UP, 2003): 265-89.
Foreword to Problems of Idealism [1902]: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy, translated, edited, and introduced by Randall A. Poole (Yale UP, 2003): vii-xviii.
“Literary Humility: the Case of Russia under its Old Regimes,” for Peace and Mind: Seriatim Symposium on Dispute, Conflict, and Enmity, in Common Knowledge 8:3 (August 2002): 482-95.
“Tolstoy’s Aesthetics,” for Donna Tussing Orwin, ed., Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (Cambridge UP, 2002): 237-51.
"Bakhtin, Lotman, Vygotsky, and Lydia Ginzburg on Types of Selves: A Tribute," in Self and Story in Russian History, eds. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Cornell University Press, 2000): 20-45.
"Pushkin, Literary Criticism, and Creativity in Closed Places," in New Literary History (vol. 29, no. 4, Autumn 1998): 653-72; also 691-96. A Forum on "An Anti-Utopian School?" with Thomas Pavel, Gary Saul Morson, and Michael André Bernstein.
"Theory," in The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel, eds. Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller (Cambridge University Press, 1998): 271-93.
"Chekhov and the Annas," in Erik Egeberg, Audun J. Morch, Ole Michael Selberg, eds., Life and Text: Essays in Honour of Geir Kjetsaa on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday (Oslo, 1997): 121-132.
"The Word of Alexander Solzhenitsyn," in The Georgia Review (Spring 1995): 64-74 [Special Issue on the Nobel Laureates of Literature: An Olympic Gathering].
"Tatiana," in Sona Stephan Hoisington, ed., A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature (Northwestern University Press, 1995): 6-20. [Translation into Russian, Vestnik Tambovskogo universiteta, 1996].
Foreward to Richard Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton University Press, 1992): xi-xvii.
"Soloviev, the Late Tolstoy, and the Early Bakhtin on the Problem of Shame and Love," Slavic Review, vol. 50, #3 (1991): 663-71.
"Freud and Bakhtin's Dostoevsky," in Wiener Slawistische Almanach 27 (1991): 33-44.
"Back to the Future: Shostakovich's Revision of Leskov's Lady Macbeth," in Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 1, #1 (March 1989): 59-78.
"Musorgsky's Libretti on Historical Themes: From the Two Borises to Khovanshchina," in Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, eds., Reading Opera (Princeton University Press, 1988): 235-67.
"Pretenders to History: Four Plays for Undoing Pushkin's Boris Godunov," Slavic Review, vol. 44, #2 (Summer 1985): 257-279.
"The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin," PMLA, vol. 100 (January 1985): 68-80.
Work in progress:
1) Introduction to Russian Literature, under commission by Cambridge University Press.
2) Russian spiritual philosophers as literary critics: an appreciation
3) Current critical trends and journal wars in the post-Communist literary academy