Carnegie Mellon University
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Tatyana Gershkovich

Tatyana Gershkovich

William S. Dietrich II Associate Professor of Russian Studies

Address
Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics
4980 Margaret Morrison St
Posner Hall 341
Pittsburgh, PA, 15213

Education

Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
B.A., Slavic Studies, Harvard University

Bio

Tatyana Gershkovich is William S. Dietrich II Associate Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds (2022) and co-translator of Silhouettes of Russian Writers: Literary and Philosophical Essays by Yuli Aikhenvald (2025). Her scholarly work has appeared in PMLA, Slavic and Eastern European Journal and Journal of the History of Ideas, among other publications.

Her current project, Tolstoy Red and White, uses the posthumous battle for Leo Tolstoy’s legacy to investigate the post-Revolutionary cultural clash between the Soviets and the Russian emigres.

  • Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian prose
  • Modernism
  • European philosophy and intellectual history
  • Aesthetics
  • Interwar émigré history and culture
  • Intermediate Russian
  • Advanced Russian
  • Radicals, Heretics, Hackers: Russian Outlaws in History, Literature and Film
  • 19th-Century Russian Masterpieces
  • From Augustine to Avatars: Personal Narratives Across Media
  • 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
  • Tatyana Gershkovich, Madeline Kehl, Simon DeDeo. Public Patterns in Private Writing: Computational Insights into Russophone Diaries. The Russian Review. 84: 2025; 484–501. https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.70026.

  • Blackwell, Stephen H., and Tatyana Gershkovich, editors. Silhouettes of Russian Writers: Literary and Philosophical Essays by Yuli Aikhenvald. Translated by Stephen H. Blackwell and Tatyana Gershkovich, Academic Studies Press, 2025.

  • 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.

     

Department Member Since 2016