Irina Paperno teaches Russian literature and intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia, also from Cornell, and Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. She is coeditor of several books, including Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism.

"With this, her third magisterial book, the eminent literary and cultural historian Irina Paperno moves from Russia's nineteenth into the twentieth century, of which she was a denizen and which is now history. As usual, Paperno works at the elusive borderline between 'raw life' and the 'meaning(s)' born from its foam. The riveting interest of the stories told by history's participants is matched by the sophistication of the analyst."—Alexander Zholkovsky, University of Southern California

Irina Paperno teaches Russian literature and intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia, also from Cornell, and Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. She is coeditor of several books, including Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism.

"With this, her third magisterial book, the eminent literary and cultural historian Irina Paperno moves from Russia's nineteenth into the twentieth century, of which she was a denizen and which is now history. As usual, Paperno works at the elusive borderline between 'raw life' and the 'meaning(s)' born from its foam. The riveting interest of the stories told by history's participants is matched by the sophistication of the analyst."—Alexander Zholkovsky, University of Southern California

Irina Paperno teaches Russian literature and intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia, also from Cornell, and Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. She is coeditor of several books, including Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism.

"With this, her third magisterial book, the eminent literary and cultural historian Irina Paperno moves from Russia's nineteenth into the twentieth century, of which she was a denizen and which is now history. As usual, Paperno works at the elusive borderline between 'raw life' and the 'meaning(s)' born from its foam. The riveting interest of the stories told by history's participants is matched by the sophistication of the analyst."—Alexander Zholkovsky, University of Southern California