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.

“The work—a collection of Zorin’s writing about the intersection of state ideology and literature in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russia—was hailed as a crucial text in Russian literary and historical studies upon its initial publication in 2001. Since then it has become required reading for students of Imperial Russian history and culture. . . .The careful translations ably preserve the nuances of the original Russian—no small feat, and one that speaks volumes about its translators. This English edition will bring Zorin’s work to a broader audience, enabling more researchers and students to engage with his seminal discussion of the Russian state’s ideological models and their transformation into cultural symbols during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”— Katherine Bowers, University of British Columbia, Modern Language Review, Volume 111, Part 2 (April 2016)“. . . Zorin commands a broad range of literary and historical literature and his essays give depth to the selected themes concerning the reigns of Catherine II and Alexander I. . . . [T]he difficult translation is generally skillful and it makes available for Anglophones a more profound examination of historical events discussed.”— Carrol F. Coates, Independent Scholar, Slavic and East European Journal, 59.2 (Summer 2015)“Rendering Zorin’s unique style and rhetorical ethos in English is a tall order, but Levitt’s and Monnier’s translations almost always get it right, and their rendition of Zorin is spot on. . . . This is an excellent and sorely needed translation of an important book. Though it has long since become part of the scholarly discourse in Russian literary and cultural history, Zorin’s book could and should have a role in other disciplines as well. Levitt is to be commended for opening a window for it to the wider world. This book will be greeted with particular enthusiasm by faculty who teach Russian literary and cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to undergraduates or novice graduate students whose Russian is not yet sufficient to enjoy Zorin in the original.”— Joe Peschio, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, The Russian Review (Vol. 74, No. 3)