This is an interview with Professor Mikhail Epstein on his latest book The Russian Anti-World: Politics on the Verge of Apocalypse. It was conducted on May 18, 2023 by Peter Gregory Winsky. Mikhail’s book can be purchased here, and all proceeds go to aiding Ukrainian refugees.
Mikhail N. Epstein is a cultural and literary scholar. He is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University. He moved from the USSR to the USA in 1990. In 1990–1991, he was a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Washington, D.C. He has been teaching at Emory University since 1991. From 2012 to 2015, he served as Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation at Durham University (UK). Epstein’s research interests include new directions in the humanities; contemporary philosophy and religion, in particular the philosophy of culture and language; the poetics and history of Russian literature; postmodernism; and the evolution of language. Epstein has authored 40 books and more than 800 articles, some of which have been translated into 26 languages. His latest books include Ideas Against Ideocracy: Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991) (2022); The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period, 1953-1991 (2019); A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities in Thought and Culture (2019); The Irony of the Ideal: Paradoxes of Russian Literature (2017), and The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (2012). He is а recipient of Andrei Bely Award (St. Petersburg, 1991), the prize of the London Institute of Social Inventions for intellectual creativity (1995), the International Essay competition award (Berlin-Weimar, 1999), and Liberty Prize (New York, 2000). His most complete bio– and bibliography is in: Homo Scriptor. Sbornik statei i materialov v chest’ 70–letiia Mikhaila Epshteina (Homo Scriptor: A Collection of Articles and Materials in Honor of Mikhail Epstein’s 70th Anniversary). Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2020, 688 pp.
Peter Winsky received his Ph.D in Slavic Languages and Literatures in June 2021 from the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation “Dostoevsky through the Lens of Orthodox Personalism: Synergetic Anthropology and Relational Ontology as Poetic Foundations of Higher Realism” approaches the post-Siberian novels of Dostoevsky within the context of contemporary Orthodox philosophical and theological trends. His research focuses on Russian literature of the 19th century and Orthodox Personalism, as well as Russian Ornamentalist prose of the early 20th century and Yugoslave Blackwave Cinema. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California, teaching courses on Russian 19th century literature, cultural history, and religious and philosophical thought. Peter is editor for the Northwestern University Studies in Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought.
The opening song is Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 4
Image: Gustave Klimt, Life and Death 1910-11