Gavriel Shapiro is Professor Emeritus of Comparative and Russian Literature at Cornell University. Before becoming a literary scholar, Shapiro graduated from Moscow University with a major in chemistry and worked as a News Editor for the Russian Division of The Voice of Israel in Jerusalem.
From September to December 1999, Shapiro had worked at the American Academy in Berlin on a book entitled The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Painting (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2009). Shapiro is also the author of Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (1993), Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” (1998), The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father (2014), Thanksgiving All Year Round (2016), and Exploring Vladimir Nabokov’s Creative Universe: Themes and Devices (2026) as well as the editor of Nabokov at Cornell (2003). Shapiro has also contributed numerous articles and book chapters to various scholarly periodicals and critical collections, primarily focusing on Nabokov and his literary legacy.
A recent selection of articles:
“Some Observations on Nabokov’s Faith.” Nabokov Online Journal 16 (2022): 1–24. http://www.nabokovonline.com/uploads/2/3/7/7/23779748/vol._16_shapiro_on_nabokovs_faith.pdf.
“Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘The Banality of Crime’ and Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Banality of Evil.’” Nabokovian 86 (Spring 2024). https://thenabokovian.org/sites/default/files/2024-06/Shapiro_Spring_2024.pdf.
“Vladimir Nabokov and Italian Renaissance Painting.” Nabokov Studies 19 (2023–24): 99–127. https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2023.a937386.
“The El Greco Passage in Lolita.” Nabokovian 90 (Spring 2026). https://thenabokovian.org/sites/default/files/2026-04/Shapiro_Spring_2026.pdf.
