What The Nightingale Is Silent About: Scholarly Tales On Russian Culture From Peter The First To Budyonnyi’s Mare

(Moscow: Ivan Limbakh, 2022)

The book is based on a series of "detective" articles and notes about iconic and undeservedly forgotten authors, characters, and texts of Russian literature from Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Osip Mandelstam, Daniil Kharms and Velimir Khlebnikov to the Estonian visionary Ivan Narodny and the nameless creator of the tragic Ukrainian folk song; from the disappointed officer Pechorin, nihilist Bazarov, envious Kavalerov, the dreary clerk Epikhodov and the unlucky goose thief Panikovsky to the happy kitten named Pushkin, and the playful mare of commander Budyonny. Most of the "half-funny" and "half-sad" scholarly novellas included in the book are united by the author's natural desire to disperse, at least in his thoughts and imagination, the dark melancholy of our historical epoch.

Transfers: Literary Translation As Interpretation And Provocation

(Moscow: Ruthenia, 2022)

In this book, I propose a third mode of translation strategy, after Venuti’s “domestication” and “foreignization,” canonized in the 1990s. This other interpretation technique is the “personalization” of the original, in which the translator consciously or unconsciously perceives a “foreign” text as his or her own’s one. Through this text, the translator then expresses his or her “personal” content: individual allusions, conflicts, ideas, emotions, and situations that are relevant to the translator and his or her circle of readers. This personalized translation, usually addressed to a select circle of readers who are devoted to the translator’s “legend,” features many modifications. However, despite these internal differences, the “personalization” of the original is a completely independent practice that borders on individual creativity.

Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015

The first major study in English of Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852)—poet, transla­tor of German romantic verse, and mentor of Pushkin—this book brings overdue attention to an important figure in Russian literary and cultural history. Vinitsky’s “emotional biography” argues that Zhukovsky very consciously set out to create for himself an emotional life reflecting his unique brand of romanticism, different from what we associate with Pushkin or poets such as Byron or Wordsworth. For Zhukovsky, ideal love was harmonious, built on a mystical foundation of spiritual kinship. Vinitsky shows how Zhukovksy played a pivotal role in the evolution of ideas central to Russia’s literary and cultural identity from the end of the eighteenth century into the decades following the Napoleonic Wars.

Count Of Sardinia: Dmitrii Khvostov And Russian Culture

Winner of 2018
Marc Raeff Book Prize

"In this study we endeavor to understand and master the works and days of the endlessly clever, yet notorious Russian poetaster, Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostoff (a Count of Sardinia and very well off). We examine his biography and delusions of authorial grandiosity and find the features of a stable genius, as well as his artistry and compulsive verbosity (which was both pathological and devious). All aspects of his parodic personality are explained by the theory of poetic vitality (Patient 2014; Chooshkin; McGonagall and Schitoff). The book argues that only the nation that gave us Pushkin could give us a poet as bad as Khvostoff."

Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism

“On the whole, as I suppose, it makes sense to speak of two polar types of artistic spiritualism in literature (that is, two attempts at the ontology of the “spirit of literature”): the idea of literature as a cunning and pernicious force (“the party of the devil,” in William Blake’s words) and a relationship to it as to a live and free manifestation of spiritual life that transcends and scoffs at material reality. One may call the proponents of this idea the “party of the spirit.”

University of Toronto Press, 2009; Choice Magazine’s list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010

A Cultural History of Russian Literature

“We began this introduction to eighteenth-century Russian culture with Bishop Feofan’s eulogy to Peter the Great. We conclude with a historical anecdote which illuminates some cultural consequences of the Reform. Sometime in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the gifted satirical poet and aristocrat Petr Viazemsky (1792-1878) was visiting one of his remote estates. After a Sunday Mass, an educated (yet old-fashioned in his neoclassical literary tastes) local priest enthusiastically addressed the villagers: “You do not comprehend what kind of Master Our Lord gave you, my Orthodox brothers! He is the Russian Horace, the Russian Catullus, the Russian Martialis!” After each of these lofty attestations, as Viazemsky ironically (and sadly) comments, his pious peasants bowed to earth and vigorously crossed themselves.”

Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009; together with Andrew Wachtel

Interpreter’s House: Poetic Semantics and Historical Imagination of Vasily Zhukovsky

NLO, 2006, in Russian

“Zhukovsky is the prophet not of Revolution (like the early romantics) but of Restoration (like the Biedermeier authors). His works are not products of free creativity, but of translation as an aesthetic and moral principle: “selfless obedience” and “arbitrary subjection” to the “sacred” in the original, the restoration of harmony via “struggle against the obstacle” (Viazemsky) of the chaotic word-for-word translation. It was precisely the venerable, eternal Odyssey (the mother of European poetry) that should have become the culmination of his poetic (i.e., translating) activities, the very epic (“the beginning of a new era”) that would foretell and bring about the victory of justice and order over chaos, and for that reason would prove so indispensable to the contemporary world.”

Unacknowledged Legislators: Studies in Russian Literary History and Poetics in Honor of Michael Wachtel

The 50th volume of Stanford Slavic Studies brings together prominent international specialists in the study of Russian literary history. 42 contributors are affiliated with leading academic centers in the United States, the European Union, United Kingdom, Russia, and Israel. Their essays propose new approaches and introduce hitherto unknown materials that address themes central to literary scholarship, such as theory of Russian verse, history of Russian Formalism, Russian-German and Russian-Italian cultural ties. The chapters of this book cover such towering figures of modern Russian letters as Pushkin, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, Nabokov, and Pasternak.

The volume is dedicated to the distinguished authority in Russian poetry and comparative literary studies, Professor of Princeton University Michael Wachtel.

Ed. By Lazar Fleishman, David M. Bethea, Ilya Vinitsky. Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Sep 18, 2020. 996 pages

Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture

“Following tradition, [Catherine the Great] considered melancholy a disease of sick imagination and a Western disorder, poisoning weak Russian souls. It is not an accident that among the patients of the first St. Petersburg mad asylum … were two freemasons V. Ya. Kolokol'nikov and M. I. Nevzorov. Both young scholars had just returned from abroad (commonplace melancholy travelers in the Western tradition) and both were diagnosed as hypochondriacs. Since the time of Catherine the Great this medical (psychiatric) diagnosis has been used by the Russian authorities as a simple and effective way to discredit and/or isolate their political and ideological opponents, including some of the Decembrists, Count Dmitriev-Mamonov, Pyotr Chaadaev, and Leo Tolstoy.”

Toronto University Press 2007; co-edited with Angela Brintlinger