Scholarly interests
Wachtel’s scholarship ranges over a broad array of languages,cultures and disciplines,with a primary focus on the feedback loops between longue durée cultural and historical processes. His first book,The Battle for Childhood:Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford UP,1990) [1] examined the ways in which the Russian understanding of childhood grew out of a series of founding literary texts.
In An Obsession with History:Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford UP,1994) [2] he considered the inter-generic dialogue between fictional and historical texts in writers from Karamzin to Solzhenitsyn.
Switching his focus to Yugoslavia,Wachtel next published Making a Nation,Breaking a Nation:Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford UP 1998), [3] which focused on the various ways in which the concept of Yugoslavia was developed over almost 100 years. That book was published subsequently in the Serbian,Slovenian and Romanian languages.
In 2006,Wachtel released a large-scale study in literary sociology entitled Remaining Relevant After Communism:The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. (U of Chicago Press). [4] Based on survey data and literary analysis from across Eastern Europe and the former USSR,the book traces literature’s loss of prestige in the post-communist world and the strategies of writers to retain their importance to society. It has appeared in Serbian,Bulgarian and Czech editions as well.
In 2008,Wachtel published The Balkans in World History (Oxford UP), [5] a short history of Southeast Europe for general readers that has also appeared in Turkish,Albanian and Italian.
Wachtel has a parallel interest in Russian theatre and drama and has written a number of books and articles in this area including Petrushka:Sources and Contexts (Northwestern UP,1998) [6] and Plays of Expectations:Intertextual Relations in Russian 20th-Century Drama (U. of Washington Press,2006). He also co-wrote a cultural history of Russian literature with Ilya Vinitsky (Russian Literature,Polity Press,2008). [7]
Wachtel has worked as a translator of material from multiple Slavic languages for many years. Among his book length translations are Drago Jančar's The Prophecy and Other Stories from Slovenian,as well as Muharem Bazdulj's The Second Book from Bosnian (in conjunction with Oleg Andrić). He has published three book-length collections of the poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya from Russian,including Paul Klee’s Boat (Zephyr Press,2013) which was short-listed for the PEN Poetry Translation Award,2014. Together with Ilya Kutik he created the first major web anthology of Russian poetry From the Ends to the Beginning. [8]
Between 1994 and 2010 he served as editor of the acclaimed “Writings from an Unbound Europe”series at Northwestern University Press which published more than 50 titles from all over Eastern and Central Europe. [9]
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Ivo Andrić was a Yugoslav novelist, poet and short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. His writings dealt mainly with life in his native Bosnia under Ottoman rule.
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia, its émigrés, and to Russian-language literature. Major contributors to Russian literature, as well as English for instance, are authors of different ethnic origins, including bilingual writers, such as Kyrgyz novelist Chinghiz Aitmatov. At the same time, Russian-language literature does not include works by authors from the Russian Federation who write exclusively or primarily in the native languages of the indigenous non-Russian ethnic groups in Russia, thus the famous Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov is omitted.
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Serbian literature, refers to literature written in Serbian and/or in Serbia and all other lands where Serbs reside.
Matija Murko, also known as Mathias Murko, was a Slovenian scholar, known mostly for his work on oral epic traditions in Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian.
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Orsat "Medo" Pucić, was a Ragusan writer and an important member of the Serb-Catholic movement in Dubrovnik.
Stanislav Vinaver was a Serbian writer, poet, translator and journalist. Vinaver was born to affluent Ashkenazi Jewish parents that had immigrated to Serbia from Poland in the late 19th century. He studied at the University of Paris, volunteered to fight in the Balkan Wars and later took part in World War I as an officer in the Royal Serbian Army. In 1915, he lost his father to typhus. He travelled to France and the United Kingdom the following year, delivering lectures about Serbia and its people. In 1917, he was assigned to the Serbian consulate in Petrograd, where he was to witness the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.
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Gary Saul Morson is an American literary critic and Slavist. He is particularly known for his scholarly work on the great Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Prior to this he was chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania for many years.
Branko Mikasinovich is a Serbian American scholar of Yugoslav and Serbian literature, as well as a noted Slavist. Much of Croatian literature accessible in English are credited to him.
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The Encyclopedia of the Dead is a collection of nine stories by Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš. Combining history and fiction in what critics have seen as a postmodern fashion, the stories have helped cement Kiš's legacy as one of the most important 20th-century Yugoslav authors.
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"To the Slanderers of Russia" is a patriotic poem by Alexander Pushkin, published in 1831.
