A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
PhD in Comparative Literature (University of Texas at Austin, 1980); MAT in Russian Language Teaching, and Russian Studies (Harvard University, 1968); BA in Russian Literature (Cornell University, 1966)
For several decades my scholarly and teaching interests have been focused on the 19th century (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Russian opera) with a 20th-century pocket for Mikhail Bakhtin. Some of these themes recycle (Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, for example, which was both part of my dissertation and featured (link is external) in April 2007 on the Princeton campus, a premiere of the unrealized Pushkin / Meyerhold / Prokofiev staging of 1937); others are relatively new, such as my interest in the fate of the scholarly humanities (in the States and in contemporary Russia); the Central European novel; Russian spiritual philosophy; and dramatic experiments on the Stalinist-era stage (both Moscow Chamber Theater, and Meyerhold’s troupe), especially adaptations of the classics with incidental music.
My Introduction to Russian Literaturehas just appeared (CUP, 2008), and several other projects are in process: Lydiia Ginzburg’s alternatives to both the Formalists and Bakhtin; a restoration of the playscript of Egyptian Nights(parts George Bernard Shaw, Pushkin, and Shakespeare), performed in 1934-35 by Tairov’s Moscow Chamber Theater with Prokofiev’s music; and, for the long term, the dramatic and essayistic works of the Russian surrealist and philosopher of the theater, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950).