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:
Thursdays 10:30-11:30 and by appointmentOVERVIEW:
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
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SLAVGEN77QWin2011-12
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.
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SLAVLIT188Win2011-12
Required of majors in Russian literature. Developments in 19th- and 20th-century Russian poetry including symbolism, acmeism, futurism, and literature of the absurd. Emphasis is on close readings of individual poems. Discussions in Russian.
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SLAVGEN78NSpr2011-12
This course will be devoted to a close reading and detailed discussion of Alexander Pushkin's masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, in the context of nineteenth-century Russian and continental literary history. We will discuss major theoretical and literary-historical questions: What is realism in literature? How does it differ from other literary epochs, movements and styles? What is the novel and how does it relate to other genres? In what way does the novel in verse differ from the novel in prose? We will also explore the relationships between the narrator and the author and\nbetween the narrator and the characters in the text. Through examination of the constituent elements of verse language, we will see Pushkin's inventive contributions to world literature.