Herman Ermolaev

The Russian language, like all of Russian studies, was given an immense boost in 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik. Enrollments increased substantially, and the US government, concerned about being caught or overtaken by Soviet science and military, began allocating major funding to Russian and Slavic programs. It was clearly time to expand. Herman Ermolaev, a freshly minted Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, joined the faculty in 1959 and remained here for his entire career, becoming professor emeritus in 2007. His dissertation (later turned into a book) on Socialist Realism remains authoritative, and he has subsequently published books on Sholokhov and, most recently, Soviet censorship.

Clarence Brown

That same year Clarence Brown came to the Department from Harvard while still at work on his dissertation on Osip Mandel’shtam. Years later, after publishing the first monograph on Mandel'shtam and numerous translations of his work, Professor Brown received the Mandel’shtam archive from the poet’s widow and donated it to the University Library, where it remains one of the jewels of the manuscript collection. A conference commemorating the gift was held in October, 2001 (see Russian Review of Fall 2002 for Brown’s contribution). Professor Brown eventually shifted his affiliation to Comparative Literature and moved to emeritus status in 2000.

In 1961, Russian became a separate program. Richard Burgi , a promising young scholar with a book on the Russian hexameter (still consulted by poetry specialists), joined the faculty in 1962. He was an inspiring teacher who chaired the department until 1970 and retired in 1992.

George Krugovoy

The faculty expansion continued with the acquisition of George Krugovoy, a Ph.D. from the University of Salzburg (Austria), who had taught in a US Government language program at Syracuse University. A scholar with an abiding interest in philosophic issues,   he joined the department in 1963 and taught various level language and literature courses, notably on Dostoevsky, until 1968. Krugovoy then moved on to Swarthmore College, where he spent the remainder of his career and published his best known academic work, "The Gnostic Novel of Mikhail Bulgakov."

Veronica Dolenko

In 1964, Veronica Dolenko arrived. With the help of Eugenia Tucker, the wife of the distinguished political scientist Robert Tucker (who chaired Princeton’s first Russian Studies Program) she was to run a famously rigorous Russian language program until her retirement in 1992.

Nina Berberova

Also in 1964, Princeton initiated a graduate program in Russian literature and Slavic linguistics. Nina Berberova , a major writer of the first wave of Russian emigration, had by then joined the faculty. She supervised many of the literature dissertations, urging students to work on the largely unexplored “Silver Age.” From his vantage point in the Department of Comparative Literature, Joseph Frank also served as an advisor and advocate of the Ph.D. program.

The linguistics part of the program was manned largely by Charles E. Townsend , who joined the faculty in 1966. He had written his dissertation at Harvard and taught there first as Instructor and then as Assistant Professor. He became Chair of Princeton’s Slavic Department in 1970, a post he held until his retirement in 2002. In the course of his years at Princeton, Professor Townsend published numerous books on Russian language and linguistics, but gradually shifted his focus to Czech, beginning a serious Czech language program that continues to the present day.

Charles Townsend

Professor Townsend also taught Polish for many years and, very occasionally, Bulgarian as well. In summer 2003, Professor Townsend donated a collection of approximately 1,000 works (dictionaries, grammars, monographs, and much more), which form the core of the present Departmental Library.

This first era of graduate studies in Russian literature and Slavic linguistics produced fourteen PhDs, including Ellen Chances, who was tenured in the department and continues to teach today (her fields of interest are 19th century prose and late Soviet and post-Soviet literature and film). Other graduates of this first program also went on to teach at major institutions, and at least four are still teaching at Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, Indiana University and Florida State University . Despite its academic success, the program ran into hard times. Severe budget cuts due to curtailment of government support were a major factor, and in 1971 the graduate program was suspended.

However dark the time for the Slavic Department, Princeton continued to be a place that attracted Russians. The composer Artur Lur’e lived his last years in Princeton (in a house given to him by Jacques Maritain, much to the consternation of his wife Raissa), as did the religious thinker Georgii Florovsky, who briefly served as a visiting professor in the Slavic Department and whose personal archive is now housed in the manuscript division of the University Library. Finally, Svetlana Allilueva, daughter of Joseph Stalin, spent some years in Princeton, even doing occasional Russian language tutoring in the Department! (Her memoirs attest to fond memories of Richard Burgi.)

If Sputnik and the Cold War helped create the first graduate program, “perestroika” allowed for its reconstitution. In 1987, Professor Caryl Emerson left Cornell to join the faculty. With her advocacy (complemented by the longstanding efforts of Charles Townsend), the graduate program was reinstated. Michael Wachtel (a Harvard Ph.D. in Comparative Literature) came to the Department in 1990, the first junior hire in almost two decades. Leonard Babby, who had taught briefly in the first graduate program, returned from Cornell in 1991. Under his influence, the Ph.D. program in Slavic and Theoretical Linguistics was founded. Olga Hasty, who had been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, joined the faculty in 1994. In 2000 the department hired Ksana Blank, a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Columbia University, for upper-level Russian language instruction and assistance in the graduate literature program. Mirjam Fried, a linguist specializing in Czech, came from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001. Frank McLellan, another linguist, arrived in 2004 to serve as language coordinator of the Russian program. In 2006, Serguei Oushakine, an anthropologist with a specialization in Russia, joined the department after receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University. In 2006, Margaret Beissinger (a Harvard PhD in Folklore & Mythology), a folklorist with special interest in Romania and South Slavic countries, came to Princeton after having taught at the university of Wisconsin-Madison . She enriches the departmental curriculum by offering courses in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language as well as Slavic folklore.

Caryl Emerson

Caryl Emerson came to Princeton in 1988 with a joint appointment in Slavic and Comparative Literature. Until her retirement in 2015, she was a stalwart of both departments, directing more than twenty dissertations and countless undergraduate theses. She served as DGS and chair (for two terms) of Slavic. All the while she managed to produce a steady stream of important books and essays. In 1990, she co-authored (with Gary Saul Morson) Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford UP).  In 1994, she co-authored (with Robert Oldani) Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations (Cambridge UP). In 1997, Princeton University Press published her The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Two years later saw the appearance of her Life of Musorgsky (Cambridge UP). That same press then commissioned her to write The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature, which appeared in 2008. This was followed by a collected essays volume called All the Same the Words Don’t Go Away: Essays on Authors, Heroes, Aesthetics, and Stage Adaptations from the Russian Tradition (Academic Studies Press, 2011). Her work has been translated into Russian, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean. She has also edited ten volumes of essays or special issues of journals, written more than 100 scholarly articles as well as hundreds of reviews and smaller pieces. In her retirement, Caryl continues to publish and participate in conferences.

Caryl has received many awards for her research, including from the ACLS and the Guggenheim Foundation. Caryl has received lifetime awards for “outstanding contributions to the field” from both national Slavic organizations (AATSEEL [language and literature] and ASEEES [area studies]), in addition to awards for her individual books. She has likewise won numerous prizes for humanities at Princeton, including the President’s award for outstanding teaching (1992), the Behrman award for distinguished achievement in the humanities (1997) and the graduate mentoring award (2012).

The academic program is supplemented each year by numerous lectures, concerts, and other activities. In addition, the Princeton Council of the Humanities and the Dean’s Office has helped to bring leading Russian writers to the department for an entire semester.

In this way, both undergraduates and graduates have had the opportunity to take courses with such major cultural figures as Vladimir Voinovich , Tatiana Tolstaia , Andrei Bitov, and Dimitri Bykov. The department has also hosted visiting professors from abroad for an entire semester, including Nikolai Bogomolov, Dimitri Kuzmin, and Kirill Ospovat.

Since the renaissance of the graduate program in 1991, forty-six students have received doctoral degrees. Many of them are now teaching at American colleges and universities, including Boston University, Bucknell University, the Defense Language Institute, Kenyon College, Lafayette College, Middlebury College, Ohio State University, New School University, Pomona College, Stanford University, University of Missouri at Columbia, Notre Dame, Rutgers University, University of New Orleans, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, Vanderbilt University, University of Washington at Seattle, Wellesley College, and Willamette University. Recent graduates have also gone on to post-docs at UCLA, The University of Pennsylvania, USC, and the Harvard Society of Fellows.