TSQ No. 11 - Biographical Notes

Larisa Alekseeva has a kandidat degree in history and is a senior staff member of the Russian State Literary Museum (GLM). Her dissertation dealt with museum interpretations of the work of Mayakovsky. She works with the Literary Museum's collections on the history of twentieth-century literature, and she is the author of some fifty articles.

Yanina Arnold graduated from the University of Idaho in May 2004 with an M.A. in English, and is currently working on her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests include 20th century Russian literature and critical theory. This article resulted from her graduate thesis "Carnival and Dialogism in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita."

Naum Basovsky's poetry has been appearing since 1977. His first collection of verse, Pis'mo zakaznoe, was published in Moscow in 1989. His Svobodnyi stikh (Jerusalem, 1997) was awarded the prize of the Union of Russian-language Writers of Israel in 1999.

Mikhail Bezrodny completed his PhD at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He currently resides in Bonn. He is the author of Konets tsitaty (1998) and articles on the history and poetics of 20th century Russian literature.

Vasily Betaki is a poet, translator and architectural historian. He has been living in Paris since 1973. For twenty years he worked for Radio Svoboda and for eighteen years in the journal Kontinent. While living in the West he published ten collections of his poetry, a book of studies of contemporary Russian poets, and eight books of translations. His writings have been appearing in Russia since 1989.

Irina Borisova completed a dissertation on inter-mediality and the thematics of music in the literature of Russian romanticism. She has published a series of articles on musical and mystical subtexts in Odoevsky and Pushkin and on the poetics of musical instruments and the metalanguage of aesthetics and criticism of romanticism. She is a member of the Department of Aesthtics and Ethics in the Philosophy Faculty of St. Petersburg University. Her most recent works deal with the Venetian theme in Rozanov, the poetics of Krzhizhanovsky, and with contemporary prose and poetry.

Leonid Dubshan is a journalist and literary specialist whose interests include Griboedov, Pushkin, Pasternak and Okudzhava. His articles have appeared in collections published by IRLI and in the journals Novyi mir, Zvezda, Neva, and others. He has worked as a journalist for Radio Rossia and now contributes to Radio Svoboda.

Vadim Fadin is a poet, novelist and translator of poetry. He has published two collections of his verse, three books of verse translations and a novel. More information is available on the website: http://poetry.liter.net/fadin.html .

Olga Gershenson is an Assistant Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her research focuses on cultural expressions of Russian-Jewish diaspora. Her book Gesher: Russian Theatre in Israel; A Study of Cultural Colonization is about to appear in print (Peter Lang, 2005).

Giuseppe Ghini has been a Professor of Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Urbino since 1993. His research interests include the relationship between Bible and Russian culture (Un testo "sapienziale" nella Rus' kieviana. Il Poucenie di Vladimir Monomach [Bologna, 1990]; "The Housekeeping Accounts and the End of the World: Gogol''s Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends between Wisdom and the Apocalyptic [Russica romana 3, 1996]; La Scrittura e la steppa. Esegesi figurale e cultura russa, [Urbino 1999]); and literary translation.

Anna Golubkova is working on her dissertation, "The Problem of Evaluation in V.V. Rozanov's Literary Criticism," in the Department of Twentieth-Century Russian Literature in Moscow State University. Her interests include the Silver Age, Russian emigre literature, and the theoretical aspects of contemporary Russian literature.

Vera Kalmykova is a literary specialist and journalist. Her journalistic interest is the development of contemporary culture (literature, art, theatre). Scholarly interests include the works of Valery Briusov and issues of poetic language.

Arkadi Klioutchanski is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. He is working on his PhD dissertation "Leo Tolstoy and Science." He is a member of the Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa. He has taught Russian since 1995.

Svetlana Kuljus completed her PhD at the University of Tartu. Since 1984 she has been Associate Professor at Tallinn University, specializing in Russian literature of the early twentieth century. She has published a number of articles on the works of Mikhail Bulgakov and is editor of the series Bulgakovskii sbornik (Tallinn).

Anna Kuznetsova is a graduate of the Gorky Institute of Literature. Since 2001 she has been head of the bibliographical section of the journal Znamia and since 2004 has worked with the Russkoe zarubezh'e Library. Her regular section in Znamia, "Ni dnia bez knigi," in which she identifies and comments on significant trends in Russian publishing, has been appearing since 2003.

Antonina Kuznetsova is a narodnaia artistka of Russia and professor in the State Academy of Theatrical Arts. She has performed some forty programs, one-woman shows and compositions based on Russian and world classics, including Goethe's Faust, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, Griboedov's Woe from Wit, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and performances adapted from works by Tsvetaeva, Pasternak and others.

Aleksandr Laskin is a historian and writer and has a doctorate in Cultural Studies. Among the seven books he has published are Neizvestnye Diagilevy, ili Konets tsitaty (St. Petersburg, 1994), Muzyka vo l'du, ili Portret khudozhnikoa K. Kordobovskogo (with S. Laskin, St. Petersburg, 2000), Angel, letiashchii na velosipede (St. Petersburg, 2002), and Dolgoe puteshestvie s Diagilevymi (Ekaterinburg, 2003). He was curator of the exhibition, "Otrazheniia. S. Diagilev v grafike, skul'pture, fotografiiakh" at the Pushkin Museum in 1997 and wrote the screenplay for the documentary Novyi god v kontse veka (Lenfil'm, 2000). He has been awarded to Tsarskoe Selo prize (1993) and the prize of the journal Zvezda (2001).

Oleg Lekmanov, PhD, is author of the monographs Osip Mandelshtam, and Kniga ob akmeizme; he co-authored the commentary to Almaznyi moi venets.

Nina Mednis is a professor in the Russian literature department of Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University. Her is the author of Venetsiia v russkoi literature (Novosibirsk, 1999) and Sverkhteksty v russkoi literature (Novosibirsk, 2003) and many articles.

Margarita Meklina is an essayist and fiction writer who was born in St. Petersburg and came to the U.S. in the 1990s. In 2003 she was awarded the prestigious Andrei Belyi prize for her collection of short stories Battle at St. Petersburg published in Moscow by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. She has appeared in such periodicals as The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Contemporary Pacific, Rattapallax (all U.S., the last two publications in collaboration with Andrew Meklin) and in Russian-language literary magazines Zerkalo (Israel), Stethoscope (France), Mitin Zhurnal (Prague) and many others.

Svetlana Novikova is a theatre critic and radio journalist. She has translated a number of contemporary foreign plays into Russian and has published articles in many Russian theatrical journals; she is also the author of several books on Russian theatre actors.

Vadim Perelmuter is a poet, literary historian, essayist and translator. He began publishing in 1965. His first volume of poetry, "Diary," came out in 1984 and since then he has published two more poetry volumes (1991 and 1997) and a book on Vyazemskii (1993). In all he has contributed to some twenty books, including volumes on Vyazemskii, Sluchevskii, Krzhizhanovskii, Shengeli, Shteinberg, Khodasevich and others, as compiler, textologist, or author of introductions and commentaries. He has published over 100 articles in periodicals. Perelmuter also worked for 15 years (from 1977) on the editorial staff of "Literature Education". He initially took charge of the poetry section and then, for 12 years, headed literary theory and archival publications.

Polina Poberezkina, PhD, is a specialist in the Anna Akhmatova's poetry. She participates in the Internet project Kluevoslov (http://kluev.org.ua) and lives in Kiev, Ukraine.

Olga Rubinchik is a literary specialist who has been on the staff of the Anna Akhmatova Museum for the past ten years. She is co-author (with N.I. Popova) of Anna Akhmatova i Fontanny Dom (St. Petersburg: Dialekt, 2000) and has edited (with N.I. Popova) two other collections of memoirs of Akhmatova. Her articles and poems have appeared in Russkaia mysl and Zvezda.

Mark G. Sokolyansky (b. 1939), Ph.D., Dr. hab., has recently retired as a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Odessa (Ukraine). Now he lives in Lubeck (Germany). He lectures as a visiting professor in a number of European universities. His publications include books on Shakespeare (Perechityvaja Shekspira [Odessa, 2000]); Henry Fielding; Alexander Pushkin; Oscar Wilde; Vladimir Jabotinsky; a monograph on typology of the 18th-century novel; a book of short stories; and more than 300 essays, articles, reviews on various problems of theory and history of literature and theatre.

Elena Tolstaia was born in Leningrad and studied at the Maurice Thorez Institute in Moscow. She completed her doctoral dissertation, on Platonov, at Jerusalem University, where she now teaches Russian literature. The second edition of her book on Chekhov, Poetika razdrazheniia, and a collection of her articles are now being published by the Russian State Humanities University

Natalia Yakubova graduated from the drama studies department of the Russian Academy of Theatre Art (GITIS). Her academic interests include Polish culture, Eastern European theatre of transition period, and gender studies. As critic she has written extensively about the work of the newest generation in the European theatre and was among those who founded festival NET: New European Theatre (first edition: 1998, Moscow). Since 1995 she has been a research fellow of State Institute of Art Research, Moscow, Department of Central and Eastern European Art.

© TSQ

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