Carnegie Mellon University
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Tatyana Gershkovich

Tatyana Gershkovich

Associate Professor of Russian Studies

Address
341 Posner Hall
Department of Modern Languages
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, 15213

Education: Ph.D. Harvard University. B.A. Harvard University

Bio

I am the William S. Dietrich Associate Professor of Russian Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. With special focus on Russian Imperial and early Soviet literature, my work investigates the relationship between literary forms and reading practices: how forms condition how we read, how changing reading practices provoke new formal strategies, and the epistemic consequences of these dynamics. I examine such questions by means of both traditional and computational literary analysis, as well as cultural and intellectual history.

 I am the author of Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (Northwestern UP, 2022), and essays published in PMLA, the Slavic and Eastern European Journal, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Paris Review, and other publications. My scholarship has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Academy in Berlin, and the International Vladimir Nabokov Society.

  • Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian prose
  • Modernism
  • European philosophy and intellectual history
  • Aesthetics
  • Interwar émigré history and culture
  • 19th-Century Russian Masterpieces
  • Advanced Russian: Berlin, Paris, Harbin, New York
  • Advanced Russian: Great Short Works
  • Radicals, Heretics, Hackers: Russian Outlaws in History, Literature, and Film
  • Intermediate Russian: Life in the City
  • NEH Summer Stipend for The Legacy of Leo Tolstoy Inside and Outside Russia, 1920–1928
  • Gene Barabtarlo Prize for Best Essay on Nabokov in 2019, awarded by the International Vladimir Nabokov Society for “Suspicion On Trial: Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Nabokov’s ‘Pozdnyshev’s Address’”
  • Berlin Prize, The American Academy in Berlin
  • Falk Grant for “Conditions of Creation: Analyzing Creativity with Computational Models,” Carnegie Mellon University
  • Mellon Digital Humanities (DH) Seed Grant for Beyond the Ant Brotherhood: A Visualization of Tolstoy’s Intellectual World, Carnegie Mellon University
  • David Sloane Memorial Prize awarded for scholarly promise on the basis of my dissertation “Held Captive: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Aesthetics of Constraint,” Harvard University

  • Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (Northwestern University Press, 2022)

  • “Novels of the Émigré Everyday: Bakunina, Gazdanov, Nabokov,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel, eds. Julie Buckler and Justin Weir (Oxford University Press, 2022)
  • “Pozdnyshev’s Address,” Introduction and translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1926 dramatic monologue “Rech' Pozdnysheva,” The Paris Review 237 (Summer 2021): 106–114. 
  • “Suspicion on Trial: Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Nabokov’s ‘Pozdnyshev’s Address,’” PMLA, 134. 3 (May 2019): 459–474.

  • “Self-translation and the Transformation of Nabokov’s Aesthetics from Kamera obskura to Laughter in the Dark,” Slavic and East European Journal 63.2 (2019): 206–225.

  • “In Impossible Proximity: How to Read Like Nabokov,” The Berlin Journal 33 (Fall 2019): 55–57.

  • “Infecting, Simulating, Judging: Tolstoy’s Search for an Aesthetic Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 74 (January 2013): 115–137.

Department Member Since 2016