Gregory Freidin

 

Chair of Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Director, Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

 

Contact Information:

Building 240, Room 108

650 725 0006
gfreidin@stanford.edu
www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin

Office Hours:
Fall 2009-10: MW 2:30-4, or by appointment. Please make sure to sign up.

Education:

1978. Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California at Berkeley.
1972. Brandeis University.
1969-71. The First State Institute of Foreign Languages, Moscow, USSR

Current Projects:

A Jew on Horseback: Isaac Babel and His Worlds (Stanford University Press) EDC: 2010
The The Enigma of Isaac Babel:Biography, History, Context. Ed., intro., Gregory Freidin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, October 2009) 
Isaac Babel's Selected Writings. Norton Critical Edition. Trans. Peter Constantine. Ed., intro., annot., chrono. Gregory Freidin (W.W.Norton:, NY, December 2009)

Curriculum Vitae 

Blog:

Click here for my Slavic department blog

Website:
http://www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin/
Research
Interests:

Modern Russian literature and culture; Russian, European, and American intellectual history; Russian culture, society, and politics; the Russian-Jewish nexus; Russian modernism, contemporary Russian film and popular culture; biography.

Click here for the Curriculum Vitae

Teaching
Current Courses:
Oedipus and His Vicissitudes: Tales of Modernity from Sophocles, Freud, Turgenev, and Babel

No other twentieth-century thinker has had a greater impact on the human sciences, education, the arts, popular culture and discourse than Freud. At the heart of his theory stands the ancient story of Oedipus as told by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex. After discussing the play, we turn to Freud’s writings and focus on his rethinking of this ancient myth as a key to understanding human nature, family, society, and history. We then approach Freudian theory from a different angle—as a myth in its own right, a product of its own particular time and place, a story symbolically reconciling conflicting forces that were then reshaping European society (Cuddihy, Schorske, Simmel, Elias) The problem of uncertain identity, generational rivalry and rapid change drove Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus story, as it has many works of literature. We examine the “vicissitudes of Oedipus” in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull (1896), and Isaac Babel’s play The Sunset (1928).
Course URL: https://www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin/courses/Oedipus/hum100.htm
Click here for the course syllabus

Win
Civilizing Process: Paradigms of Society and Culture in Modern Russian Literature and FilmTexts representing theoretical models of society and culture in confrontation with works of Russian fiction and film. Emphasis is on Norbert Elias's civilizing process and related theories. Topics: body and desire (Freud, Bakhtin); manners and civilizing process (Elias, Cuddihy, Lotman); symbolic forms, ritual, and systems (Geertz, Clark, Zorin); identities and practices (de Certeau, Bourdieu, Dobrenko); subcultures (Hebdidge). Authors include Mayakovsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Erofeev, Pelevin, Trifonov, and Petrushevskaia; film makers: Mamin, Sakurov, Rogozhkin, Balabanov. Knowledge of Russian is recommended but not necessary.Spr
Previous Courses:
Dissent and Disenchantment: Russian Literature and Culture, 1953 to the PresentFrom the death of Stalin to post-communist Russia. Literature of the thaw and de-Stalinization, official and unofficial literature of dissent, samizdat, village and urban prose, emigration, underground, sots-art, perestroika, and post-communist literature and culture. Texts in English translation. For graduate credit for research paper, register for 399. GER:DB-Hum, EC-GlobalCom webiste: https://www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin/courses/148/index.htm Spr
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Social Thought of Its TimeThemes: institutions of the family and gender; debate about the female body, church, and religion; the decline of privilege and the rise of capital and industry; the meaning of art and the artist; conflicts of law and custom, country and city, andnationalism and cosmopolitanism; and the ascetic rejection of the world. Authors include Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Weber, and Freud.Spr
Selected Publications:
TitleYear
Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings. Norton Critical Edition.Trans. P. Constantine. Ed. G. Freidin2009Link
Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup 1994Link
The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context. Ed., intro. Gregory Freidin2009Link
A Coat of many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and his Mythologies of Self Presentation1987Link
Eduard Bagritsky: Soviet Poet/Russian Jew2003
Professional Activities:
Member of the Editorial Board, The Slavic Review
Co-Editor, Stanford Slavic Studies
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