This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov—poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov’s eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer’s emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov’s multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.
Klavdia Smola, a Moscow-born scholar, is Professor and Chair of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the
Department of Slavic Studies, University of Dresden (Germany). She obtained her Ph.D. at the
University of Tübingen, taught at the University of Greifswald, and was research fellow at the
universities of Jerusalem, Moscow, Barcelona, Constance and Cracow. She authored the books Types
and Patterns of Intertextuality in the Prose of Anton Chekhov (2004, in German) and Reinvention of
Tradition: Contemporary Russian-Jewish Literature (2019, in German). Smola co-edited Jewish
Underground Culture in the late Soviet Union (Special Issue of the journal East European Jewish
Affairs, 2018); Russia—Culture of (Non-)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Era to the Present (Special
Issue of the journal Russian Literature, 2018, with Mark Lipovetsky); Postcolonial Slavic Literatures
after Communism (2016, together with Dirk Uffelmann); Jewish Spaces and Topographies in East-
Central Europe: Constructions in Literature and Culture (2014, in German, together with Olaf Terpitz),
and Eastern European Jewish Literatures of the 20th and 21st Centuries: Identity and Poetics (2013).
Maxim D. Shrayer, translingual author, scholar and translator, was born in Moscow and emigrated in 1987 with his parents, David Shrayer-Petrov and Emilia Shrayer. He is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College and Director of the Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry at the Davis Center, Harvard University. Shrayer is the author and editor of over 15 books of criticism and biography, fiction and nonfiction, and poetry. His books include The World of Nabokov’s Stories, Russian Poet/Soviet Jew, Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, Bunin and Nabokov: A History of Rivalry (which was a bestseller in Russia), Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, and, most recently, Antisemitism and the Decline of Russian Village Prose and Of Politics and Pandemics: Songs of a Russian Immigrant. He is the editor of An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature and Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature. Shrayer is a Guggenheim Fellow and the winner of a National Jewish Book Award. Shrayer’s works have appeared in ten languages.
Roman Katsman was born in the USSR and has lived in Israel since 1990. He is a Professor in the
Department of Literature of the Jewish People in Bar-Ilan University. Katsman is the author of number
of books and articles about Hebrew and Russian literature, particularly about Jewish-Russian and
Russian-Israeli literature and thought. He has worked on the theoretical problems of mythopoesis, chaos,
nonverbal communication, sincerity, alternative history, and humor. His most recent books, Elusive
Reality: A Hundred Years of Russian-Israeli Literature (1920-2020), (2020, in Russian) and Nostalgia
for a Foreign Land (2016, in English), examine the Russian-language literature in Israel. Other major
publication include Laughter in Heaven: Symbols of Laughter in the Works of S.Y. Agnon, in Hebrew
(2018), Literature, History, Choice: The Principle of Alternative History in Literature (2013), At the
Other End of Gesture. Anthropological Poetics of Gesture in Modern Hebrew Literature (2008), Poetics
of Becoming: Dynamic Processes of Mythopoesis in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic
Literature (2005), The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon (2002) and
others.
