The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov: A Collection Published on the Occasion of the Writer?s 85th Birthday

This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov―poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov’s eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer’s emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov’s multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.

Roman Katsman was born in the USSR and has lived in Israel since 1990. He is a Professor in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People in Bar-Ilan University. Katsman is the author of number of books and articles about Hebrew and Russian literature, particularly about Jewish-Russian and Russian-Israeli literature and thought. He has worked on the theoretical problems of mythopoesis, chaos, nonverbal communication, sincerity, alternative history, and humor. His most recent books, Elusive Reality: A Hundred Years of Russian-Israeli Literature (1920-2020), (2020, in Russian) and Nostalgia for a Foreign Land (2016, in English), examine the Russian-language literature in Israel. Other major publication include Laughter in Heaven: Symbols of Laughter in the Works of S.Y. Agnon, in Hebrew (2018), Literature, History, Choice: The Principle of Alternative History in Literature (2013), At the Other End of Gesture. Anthropological Poetics of Gesture in Modern Hebrew Literature (2008), Poetics of Becoming: Dynamic Processes of Mythopoesis in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic Literature (2005), The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon (2002) and others.

Maxim D. Shrayer, bilingual author and scholar, was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family with Ukrainian and Lithuanian roots and spent over eight years as a refusenik. He and his parents, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov and the translator Emilia Shrayer, left the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1987. Shrayer received a PhD from Yale University in 1995. He is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. Shrayer has authored and edited over twenty books of nonfiction, criticism, fiction, poetry, and translations. Among his books are the literary memoirs Waiting for America and Leaving Russia and the collection A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas. He is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. Shrayer’s publications have been translated into thirteen languages. He also edits the "Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy" and the "Immigrant Worlds & Texts" series. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, a medical researcher and physician, and their daughters Mira and Tatiana.

Klavdia Smola, a Moscow-born scholar, is Professor and Chair of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the Department of Slavic Studies, University of Dresden (Germany). She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen, taught at the University of Greifswald, and was research fellow at the universities of Jerusalem, Moscow, Barcelona, Constance and Cracow. She authored the books Types and Patterns of Intertextuality in the Prose of Anton Chekhov (2004, in German) and Reinvention of Tradition: Contemporary Russian-Jewish Literature (2019, in German). Smola co-edited Jewish Underground Culture in the late Soviet Union (Special Issue of the journal East European Jewish Affairs, 2018); Russia―Culture of (Non-)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Era to the Present (Special Issue of the journal Russian Literature, 2018, with Mark Lipovetsky); Postcolonial Slavic Literatures after Communism (2016, together with Dirk Uffelmann); Jewish Spaces and Topographies in East-Central Europe: Constructions in Literature and Culture (2014, in German, tgether with Olaf Terpitz), and Eastern European Jewish Literatures of the 20th  and 21st  Centuries: Identity and Poetics (2013).