Andrew Kahn, St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Mark Lipovetsky, University of Colorado-Boulder, Irina Reyfman, Columbia University, Stephanie Sandler, Harvard University

Andrew Kahn is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on Russian Enlightenment literature and on Russian poetry, including Pushkin's Lyric Intelligence (OUP, 2008, pbk. 2012). His studies often focus on the interplay between the history of ideas and how writers think with literature.

Mark Lipovetsky is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA). He is the author of nine books on Russian literature and culture including Paralogies: Transformations of the (Post)Modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s-2000s (2008), Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (with Birgit Beumers), Charms of Cynical Reason: The Trickster's Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (2011), and Postmodern Crises: From Lolita to Pussy Riot (2017). He has co-edited a volume of Dictionary of Literary Biography: Russian Writers Since 1980 (2003), such anthologies as Politicizing Magic: Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (2005), 50 Writers: An Anthology of the Twentieth-Century Russian Short Story (2011), Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Literature (in 2 vols., 2014, 2015), and such collections of articles as Veselye chelovechki: Cult Heroes of Soviet Childhood (2008), A Non-Canonical Classic: D. A. Prigov (2010), and Russian Literature since 1991 (CUP, 2015).

Irina Reyfman is Professor of Russian Literature at Columbia University. In her studies, Reyfman focuses on the interaction of literature and culture, examining both how literature reacts to cultural phenomena and how it contributes to the formation of cultural biases and forms of behavior. Reyfman is the author of How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Rannks (Madison, Wisconsin, 2016), Vasilii Trediakovsky: The Fool of the `New' Russian Literature (Stanford, 1990), and Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford, 1999); the latter book also appeared in Russian (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002). She is also a co-editor (with Catherine T. Nepomnyashchy and Hilde Hoogenboom) of Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008).

Stephanie Sandler is the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She has written on Pushkin and later myths about him, including Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989) and Commemorating Pushkin: Russia's Myth of a National Poet (2004). Other interests include ideas of selfhood and identity in Russian literature and film, which led to a co-edited volume, Self and Story in Russian History (2000, with Laura Engelstein); and questions of sex and gender, subject of another edited volume, Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (1993, 1998, with Jane Costlow and Judith Vowles). She has co-edited a pioneering collection of essays on the contemporary poet Olga Sedakova, published in Russia in 2017 and due out in English with University of Wisconsin Press.

Finalist of the 2019 PROSE Award in Literature by the Association of American Publishers
Honourable Mention from the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures

"This exhaustive volume represents a very significant contribution to the bibliography of Russian literary history from the medieval to the modern period. In its scope, conception and engagement with scholarship, this is the kind of account which comes along only once every generation, a work informed by the lifelong study of four preeminent scholars of Russian literature from both sides of the Atlantic. ...The authors have been extraordinarily thorough throughout in their generous engagement with the scholarship and secondary literature in both Russian and English. ...It will inevitably feature in the comprehensive exam lists of all graduate students of Russian literature." -- Kate Holland, Slavic Review

"The Oxford History paves the way" -- Caryl Emerson, Princeton University, Slavonic and East European Review

"All academic fields are under pressure to be constantly open to shifting global perspectives and previously unheard voices. Can even the most meticulous hard-copy linear narrative hope to keep up with these challenges? In my view, the new Oxford History of Russian Literature, a staggering accomplishment, manages to do so." -- Carly Emerson, Princeton University, Slavonic and East European Review

"This new history of Russian literature written by four Slavists is an interesting and useful book. It is a very timely book... It is informative, the material, nonetheless, fits compactly in one volume. It covers the familiar and also offers an abundance of unusual solutions/positions. It is addressed to the Anglophone readers but holds just as much interest for the Russian. The sociological approach that the authors maintain is realized in the special attention to institutions and conditions in which literature functions (from Ancient Russia to post-perestroika Russia); to the evolution of subjectivity, manifested in literary forms that also give evidence of the self-awareness of man in different periods; to the narratives that, on the one hand, can be extracted from texts and, on the other, form national identity. Literature both mirrors societal life and defines it." -- Translated from New Literary Observer (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie)

"Of particular importance to nonspecialists will be inclusion throughout of detailed definitions of key literary and historical terms. A section of color plates, along with black-and-white illustrations, afford welcome visual perspective. The bibliography and endnotes are exhaustive and have already served this reviewer's further investigations. This comprehensive, articulate history should prove invaluable to a broad readership. ... Summing up: Essential." -- CHOICE

"what Kahn, Lipovetsky, Reyfman and Sandler have managed to encompass and contextualize ... is nothing short of staggering." -- Boris Dralyuk, Times Literary Supplement