By Fables Alone

Andrei Zorin is a cultural and literary historian. Before taking a Chair of Russian at Oxford (2004), he was a Professor at the Russian State University for Humanities, Moscow and a Visiting Professor in many American universities, including Harvard (1999, 2003), Stanford (1995, 2000), NYU (2001), and the University of Michigan (1999). Zorin is a member of several leading academic magazine boards, including the Slavic Review (USA), Cahiers du Monde Russes (France), and the New Literary Review (NLO) (Russia). He has published more than 150 articles in Russian, English, French, German and Italian. He is also the editor of Lydia Ginzburg’s Prokhodiashchie kharaktery (Moscow, 2011; with E. van Buskirk). By Fables Alone is a translation of his monograph, Kormia dvuglavogo orla…, published in Russian in 2001.

“By Fables Alone is a welcome English version of Andrei Zorin’s 2001 groundbreaking volume containing a number of expert and imaginative examinations of ideological models produced during Catherine II’s, Alexander I’s, and Nicholas I’s reigns. Zorin, a leading scholar of Russian literature and culture of the period, begins, in Chapters One to Four, with the incisive discussion of the so-called Greek Project masterminded by Catherine the Great; moves, in Chapters Five to Nine, to the analyses of several politically significant cultural developments in Alexander’s time; and ends, in Chapter Nine, with a brilliant examination of the central ideological formula of Nicholas I’s reign, “Orthodoxy—Autocracy—Nationality,” conceived and articulated by Sergei Uvarov. Equally at home with literature, culture, and politics of the time, Russian as well as Western, Zorin moves effortlessly between these fields to explain the formation of Russian cultural myths, some of which are relevant even today. Expertly translated by Marcus C. Levitt, the book is a fascinating read for any scholar interested in the process of formation of cultural symbols serving ideological purposes.”