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 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]
Pan-Slavism, a movement that took shape in the mid-19th century, is the political ideology concerned with promoting integrity and unity for the Slavic people. Its main impact occurred in the Balkans, where non-Slavic empires had ruled the South Slavs for centuries. These were mainly the Byzantine Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Venice.
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. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the Age of Enlightenment, literature had grown in importance, and from the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry, prose and drama. Romanticism permitted a flowering of poetic talent: Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Prose was flourishing as well. Mikhail Lermontov was one of the most important poets and novelists. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Ivan Turgenev, who mastered both short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy soon became internationally renowned. Other important figures of Russian realism were Ivan Goncharov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nikolai Leskov. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in short stories and became a leading dramatist. The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Gumilyov, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva. This era produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin and Nobel Prize winners Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fyodor Sologub, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Belyaev, Andrei Bely and Maxim Gorky.
Miroslav Krleža was a Yugoslav and Croatian writer who is widely considered to be the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century. He wrote notable works in all the literary genres, including poetry, theater, short stories, novels, and an intimate diary. His works often include themes of bourgeois hypocrisy and conformism in Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Krleža wrote numerous essays on problems of art, history, politics, literature, philosophy, and military strategy, and was known as one of the great polemicists of the century. His style combines visionary poetic language and sarcasm.
The Bridge on the Drina is a historical novel by the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić. It revolves around the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad, which spans the Drina River and stands as a silent witness to history from its construction by the Ottomans in the mid-16th century until its partial destruction during World War I. The story spans about four centuries and covers the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian occupations of the region, with a particular emphasis on the lives, destinies, and relations of the local inhabitants, especially Serbs and Bosnian Muslims.
Serbian literature, refers to literature written in Serbian and/or in Serbia and all other lands where Serbs reside.
Igor Štiks is a novelist and scholar. His novels The Judgment of Richard Richter and A Castle in Romagna have earned him multiple awards; the former has been translated into 15 languages.
Filip Višnjić was a Serbian epic poet and guslar. His repertoire included 13 original epic poems chronicling the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire and four reinterpreted epics from different periods of history of Serbia.
Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism, Chicago regional studies, African American intellectual history, theater and performance studies, and fiction. Parneshia Jones is director of the press. It is a member of the Association of University Presses.
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.
The Heldt Prize is a literary award from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies named in honor of Barbara Heldt. The award has been given variously in the following categories:
Wayne S. Vucinich was an American historian. Following World War II, he was one of the founders of Russian, Slavic, East European and Byzantine studies at Stanford University, where he spent his entire academic career.
Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov was a Russian philologist and translator, renowned for his studies in classical philology and the history of versification, and a member of the informal Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1957 and worked at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, the Russian State University for the Humanities, and the Russian Language Institute in Moscow. In 1992 Gasparov was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Science.
Hasanaginica, also Asanaginica, is a South Slavic folk ballad, created during the period of 1646–49, in the region of Imotski, which at the time was a part of the Bosnia Eyalet of the Ottoman Empire.
Croatian literature refers to literary works attributed to the medieval and modern culture of the Croats, Croatia, and Croatian. Besides the modern language whose shape and orthography were standardized in the late 19th century, it also covers the oldest works produced within the modern borders of Croatia, written in Church Slavonic and Medieval Latin, as well as vernacular works written in Čakavian and Kajkavian dialects.
Irwin Weil is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University. He is noted for his work in promoting cultural exchange and mutual understanding between the USA and the USSR/Russia, and for attracting large numbers of students to his courses. He recorded a popular series of lectures Classics of Russian Literature for The Teaching Company in 2005.
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.
Clare Cavanagh is an American literary critic, a Slavist, and a translator. She is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. An acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, she is currently under contract to write the authorized biography of Czesław Miłosz. She holds a B.A from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A. and PhD from Harvard University. Before coming to Northwestern University, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work has been translated into Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese.
"To the Slanderers of Russia" is a patriotic poem by Alexander Pushkin, published in 1831.
