Recent Visitors

Professor Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Full Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, winner of the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1996) and of the "Russian" Booker Prize for nonfiction (1998).

Dr. Gasparov, the foremost authority on Russian poetics and comparative study of verse, is the Research Director of the Division of Stylistics and Poetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and Professor at the Russian State University of Humantities. He was a visiting scholar in the Department in Winter Term 1999, teaching "Poetics of the Verse Text: The Techniques of Analysis and Interpretation" and conducting joint research with Professor Ronen on the critical edition of the poetry of Ossip Mandel'shtam. Dr. Gasparov is the author of hundreds of articles and scores of books on classical and modern philology and poetics, especially Russian verse. His most recent books are "A History of European Versification" (Oxford, 1996), "Izbrannye trudy" [Selected Works] (in three volumes, Moscow, 1997),and "Zapisi i vypiski" [Records and Excerpts, previously serialized in Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie] (Moscow, 1999). He has translated into Russian many masterpieces of European poetry, including all of Pindar's odes, Ovid's "Ars amandi", and Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso". He also published a remarkable book for children: "Zanimatel'naia Gretsiia" [Greece for Fun].

Professor Ludmila Baliasnikova, Herzen Institute, St. Petersburg

Professor Baliasnikova, a specialist in Russian language instruction and head of the Department of Pedagogy in Multicultural Society at the Herzen Institute, had a visiting appointment in the Department for Fall Term 1999. She is the author of numerous studies on Russian applied linguistics, as well as the co-author of the Dictionary of the Briansk Dialect (1989-1994, 4 vols.) and, most recently, the Novyi tolkovyi slovar’ (1998). She taught Intensive First Year Russian and Fourth Year Russian.

Professor Boris Katz , Mussorgsky College of Music, St. Petersburg

Professor Katz is a renowned scholar with a strong interest in relations between music and literature. He has taught for us in previous years with much success, and during his most recent visit (Fall Term 1999) he taught a course on Russian satire and a course on masterpieces of Russian literature. His recent publications include "'My name or any such-like phantom': A Reading of Nabokov's 'Kakoye sdelal ya durnoye dela…'" (The Russian Review, October 1999) — a paper he presented during his last visit in Ann Arbor in our Graduate Colloquium — and "'The Simple Scale' in Joseph Brodsky’s Poetry" (Festschrift for V. V. Ivanov, Moscow 1999). During the first part of his visit Professor Katz gave a lecture "Alexander Scriabin—The Last Great Challenger of Russian Musical Romanticism" in the University’s Center for Russian and East European Studies.

Professor Andrei L. Zorin, Russian State University for the Humanities.

Professor Zorin is a leading specialist in eighteenth-century Russian literature. While visiting in the Department in Fall Term 1999, he taught a course on that subject as well as a seminar on the tradition of Russian mock-heroic poetry. Professor Zorin is a prolific author, with most of his recent contributions appearing in the prestigious Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. His recent publications include "Crimea in the Formation of Russian Identity" (NLO 31, 1998), and "Zhukovsky’s Epistle ‘To Emperor Alexander’ and the Ideology of the Holly Alliance" (NLO 32, 1998); he is currently working on a monograph on the emergence of Russian official ideology in the first part of the nineteenth century. We were happy to have Professor Zorin participate in our Yuri Lotman Symposium (October 29, 1999) with a paper on Lotman’s reading of Karamzin. Professor Zorin also gave the lecture: "Formation of Russian Official Ideology in the Early Nineteenth Century and Its German Sources."

Professor Rashid Khan, Ph.D., University of Michigan.

Professor Khan is an experienced teacher and researcher. In Fall 1999 he taught third-year Russian and a Russian literature survey course. He is teaching Survey of Russian Literature in Winter 2000. His book, Dostoevsky Beyond Christianity: The Religious and Philosophical Dynamics of His Works, will soon be published by Dresden University Press.