Lazar Fleishman

Lazar Fleishman

Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Contact:

Building 240, Room 106
Phone: 650 725 0005
lazar.fleishman@stanford.edu

Office Hours:

Tuesdays 8:00-9:00 AM and by appointment

BIO:

Lazar Fleishman studied at a music school and the Music Academy in Riga, Latvia before graduating from Latvian State University in 1966. His first scholarly papers (on Pushkin, the Russian elegy, and Boris Pasternak) were published during his university years.  He emigrated to Israel in 1974, where his academic career began at the Department for Russian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was co-founder and co-editor of the series Slavica Hierosolymitana: Slavic Studies of Hebrew University (1977-1984). He was Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1978-1979; 1980-1981), The University of Texas at Austin (1981-1982), Harvard, and Yale (1984-1985) before joining the Stanford faculty in 1985. He also taught at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Princeton, Latvian State University, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), and the University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests encompass the history of 19th and 20th century Russian literature (especially, Pushkin, Pasternak, and Russian modernism); poetics; literary theory; 20th-century Russian history; Russian émigré literature, journalism and culture. He is the founder of the series Stanford Slavic Studies (1987-present), editor of the series Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures and History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2007-present) and co-editor of the series Verbal Art: Studies in Poetics (Fordham, formerly Stanford University Press).

EDUCATION:

The State University of Tartu and the Latvian State University, Ph.D. (1967-1968)
The Latvian State University, Russian and Slavic Philology (1961-1966, with honors)
The Academy of Music, Riga, USSR (1957-1961)

Courses

  • SLAVIC
    78N
    Spr
    2012-13

    Devoted to a close reading and detailed discussion of Alexander Pushkin¿s masterpiece in the context of XIX century Russian and continental literary history. Pushkin (1799-1837) is the founder of modern Russian literature; his place in it is comparable to that of Shakespeare in Britain. Taught in English.

  • SLAVIC
    147/347
    Spr
    2012-13

    Surveys major authors (may include: Mayakovsky, Babel, Kharms, Platonov, Bunin, Nabokov, Bulgakov, and Pasternak)and artistic tendencies in 20th century Russian literature and culture in the context of social and political turmoil in Russia from the 1917 revolution to the demise of Stalinism. An emphasis is placed on close reading and detailed analysis of artistic qualities of the literary works.  Taught in English.

  • SLAVIC
    229
    Aut
    2012-13

    Detailed analysis and survey of distinctive features of Russian verse culture in its historical development and in contrast with poetic traditions in other European cultures. Taught in Russian.  Prerequisites: 2nd-year Russian

  • SLAVIC
    187/387
    Win
    2012-13

    Required of majors in Russian language and literature; open to undergraduates who have completed three years of Russian, and to graduate students. The major poetic styles of the 19th century as they intersected with late classicism, the romantic movement, and the realist and post-realist traditions. Representative poems by Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Zhukovskii, Pushkin, Baratynskii, Lermontov, Tiutchev, Nekrasov, Fet, Soloviev. Taught in Russian. Prerequisites: 2nd-year Russian

  • SLAVIC
    77Q
    Aut
    2012-13

    Preference to sophomores. The work and life of Nikolai Gogol, the eccentric founder of Fantastic Realism. The relationship between romanticism and realism in Russian literature, and between popular Ukranian culture and high Russian and W. European traditions in Gogol's oeuvre. The impact of his work on 20th-century modernist literature, music, and art, including Nabokov, literature of the absurd, Shostakovich, Meyerhold, and Chagall.

  • SLAVIC
    327
    Win
    2012-13

    Focus on three major figures of Russian modernism: Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva. An analysis of experimental Futurist poetic language and techniques in the context of the polemics of various modernist movements. Taught in Russian. Prerequisites: 3rd-year Russian

Publications