Anatoly Vishevsky

Anatoly Vishevsky taught at Washington University in St. Louis and was a faculty member at the Middlebury College Summer Russian School. He came to Grinnell College in 1994, and has taught all levels of our language sequence, Russian literature in translation, tutorials, and a number of senior seminars in Russian, the two most recent on Russian Material Culture and on Contemporary Russian Theater. He has been an active scholar and has presented and published extensively. His research interests include twentieth-century humor, on which he has authored a book, Soviet Literary Culture in the 1970s: The Politics of Irony; the prose of Lermontov; and Russian literature of the 20th Century, especially the contemporary period. Among Anatoly's more recent publications is an essay on Lermontov's "Fatalist" and Pushkin's "Queen of Spades," that appeared in Literaturnaya gazeta, "Tri karty--tri sud'by" ["Three Cards--Three Fates"], and articles on Boris Akunin's detective stories, among them, "Fandorine Did It!", and "Znachenie nariada" ["On the Importance of a Wardrobe"],articles on the pop-culture of the Russian intelligentsia of the 1970s and on Russian bard Timur Shaov, and also edited a special issue of the journal Przeglad Rusycystyczny titled Politics of Russian Popular Culture. Anatoly, with Boris Briker, published a number of humorous stories in the former Soviet Union and in the West, the collection of stories was published in a book, Sobach'e delo [The Dog's Affair]. Most recently, Anatoly has been researching and writing in his home-away-from-home: Prague, Czech Republic.