Ilya Vinitsky is a professor of Russian literature at Princeton University. His books include Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia (Northwestern University Press, 2015), Ghostly Paradoxes: Modern Spiritualism and Russian Culture in the Age of Realism (Toronto University Press, 2009; Choice Magazine’s list of Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010) and A Cultural History of Russian Literature, co-written with Andrew Wachtel (Polity Press, 2009). He also co-edited Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2007). His most personal book, The Count of Sardinia: Dmitry Khvostov and Russian Culture (New Literary Observer, 2017; in Russian), investigates the phenomenon of anti-poetry in the Russian literary tradition from the 18th through the 21st century and focuses on the literary biography and cultural function of the king of bad Russian poets, Count Dmitry Khvostov. He is a 2019–2020 Guggenheim Fellow, working on the cultural biography and political imagination of Ivan Narodny, a Russian-Estonian-American “revolutionist,” arms dealer, journalist, writer, art critic, and promoter.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: A Dostoyevsky Quote Revisited
Mathematical belief is the hardest to convince someone of. Thomas believed because he wanted to believe. I didn’t want to ...
Dostoyevsky Misprisioned: “The House of the Dead” and American Prison Literature
Ilya Vinitsky follows a spurious Dostoyevsky quote into the American house of the dead....
