I grew up in New York City in a Russian emigre family and wanted to be a scientist from an early age. However, after getting Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Geology from Queens College and The City College of New York (the name of the field has changed and become more grand since those distant days), I decided that I’d learned enough about the natural world but didn’t understand myself or other people. My solution was to switch to studying literature and the humanities, which resulted in my getting a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton. This helped, and the quest continues. After teaching in the Slavic Department at Harvard, I moved to Yale’s Slavic Department in 1986, where I taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Russian literature and culture until retiring in 2018 as B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus to write full time.
