Mikhail Epstein

Mikhail Naumovich Epstein (also transliterated Epshtein; ; born 21 April 1950) is a Russian-American literary scholar, essayist, and cultural theorist best known for his contributions to the study of Russian postmodernism. He is the Emeritus S. C. Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His writings encompass Russian literature and intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, the creation of new ideas in the age of electronic media, semiotics, and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities. His works have been translated into over 26 languages.

The Modern Language Association of America awarded Epstein th
Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures
for his book ''Ideas Against Ideocracy: Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991)'' on 6 December 2023.

Biography

Mikhail Naumovich Epstein was born April 21, 1950 in Moscow, USSR, the only child of Naum Moiseevich Epstein, an accountant, and Maria Samuilovna Lifshits, an economist at Transport Publishing House. He graduated from the Department of Philology at Moscow State University in 1972 with a degree in Russian and spent the next six years as a researcher at the Department of Theoretical Problems, World Literature Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1978, he joined the Union of Soviet Writers. Epstein also began to explore Moscow's underground poetry and art scene of the 1970s, developing a lifelong interest in conceptualism,  metarealism, and the cross-cultural interplay of ideas.

Throughout the 1980s, Epstein actively engaged with Moscow's intellectual life. He founded the Essayists' Club in 1982. In 1986, as President Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost permitted more open questioning of Soviet cultural orthodoxies, Epstein established the Image and Thought association, which later gave rise to the Bank of New Ideas and Terms and the Laboratory of Contemporary Culture groups in Moscow. He was awarded the St. Petersburg-based Andrei Bely Prize for Research in the Humanities in 1991.

In 1990, Epstein emigrated to the United States, where he spent a semester teaching at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, before joining the faculty of th
Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures Department
at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Almost immediately, he received a year-long fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars(Washington, D.C.) to research Soviet ideological language. Upon his return to Emory, Epstein taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses in subjects ranging from literary theory, semiotics, and intellectual history to 19th-and 20th-century Russian literature.

From 1992-1994, Epstein researched the history of Russian thought of the late Soviet period thanks to a grant from th
National Council for Soviet and East European Research

In the second half of the 1990s, as the World Wide Web rapidly permeated both academic and popular culture, Epstein embraced the new medium for cross-cultural communication. His internet projects during this time include The InteLnet (Intellectual Network), 1995 "The Book of Books" (since 1998), and "The Gift of a Word: The Projective Lexicon of the Russian Language" (since 2000). InteLnet'
Bank of New Ideas
was recognized by the Institute for Social Inventions, awarding it the 1995 Creativity Social Innovations Award.

From fall 1999 to the spring of 2001, and again from fall of 2003 to the spring of 2006, Epstein co-chaired the interdisciplinary Gustafson faculty seminar at Emory University.

In the spring of 2011, he was appointed IAS Fellow and Prowse Fellow at Van Mildert College, Durham University Institute of Advanced Study in Durham, U.K. He remained at Durham from 2012-2015 as Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation, where he founded the Repository of New Ideas.

Research and scholarship

Epstein's research interests in the humanities include postmodernism; contemporary philosophy and theology, in particular the philosophy of culture and language; the poetics and history of Russian literature; the semiotics of everyday life, and the evolution of language.

Russian postmodernism

Epstein pioneered the study of Russian postmodernism, affirming its place in global postmodernity. In his books ''After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture'' (1995) and ''Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture'' (with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, 1999, 2015), he situated Russian fiction, poetry, art and spirituality of the 1970s–1990s both along the continuum of metaphysically oriented metarealism and linguistically self–reflective conceptualism, and in the context of the global postmodern literary-cultural conversation. According to Epstein, the first wave of Russian postmodernism harkened back to Soviet-era socialist realism of the 1930s-1950s, which opposed the "obsolete" aesthetic individualism of modernism, erased distinctions between elite and mass culture, and tried to construct a post-historical space where all the great discourses of the past could be merged and resolved.

Socialist realism managed to erase semantic differences between idea and reality, the signifier and the signified. Despite these commonalities, socialist realism lacked the playful, ironically self-conscious aspect of mature postmodernism. It was not until the late 1950s and again the 1970s that Soviet artists and writers such as Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, Aleksandr Melamid, Dmitri Prigov

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