Simon Karlinsky (22 September 1924 - 5 July 2009) was an American literary critic, historian and professor of Slavic languages.
Karlinsky was born Semyon Arkadyevich Karlinsky on 22 September 1924, in a Russian émigré enclave in Harbin, Manchuria, into a family of Polish descent. He immigrated to the US in October 1938. [1] [2] [3] He attended Belmont High School and Los Angeles City College. He joined the U.S. army in December 1943, where he would work until March 1946, [2] and worked as an interpreter in Germany in the 1950s. [1] He studied music at the École Normale de Musique de Paris under Arthur Honegger from 1951 to 1952, [4] and later at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik under Boris Blacher. [2] He received his bachelors' degree in Slavic languages and literature from UC Berkeley in 1960. He received his masters' degree from Harvard in 1961, and his doctorate from Berkeley in 1964; his doctoral thesis was about Marina Tsvetaeva. [1] [2] Karlinsky taught at UC Berkeley from 1964 to 1991 [1] He was noted for his writings about Russian emigré literature and homosexuality in Russian literature. [5] He received the Guggenheim Fellowship twice. [4] He inspired a character in Eduard Limonov's book Death of Modern Heroes (Russian : Смерть современных героев, romanized: Smert' sovremennykh geroyev). [3]
Karlinsky was gay, and lived with his husband Peter Carleton for 35 years. The two married in 2008. [4] He died of congestive heart failure on 5 July 2009. [1]