Michael A. Wachtel

Class of Fall 2012

Chair and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Princeton University

Viacheslav Ivanov: A Biography

At the American Academy in Berlin, Wachtel worked on a biography of Viacheslav Ivanov, the primary theoretician of Russian Symbolism, whose views of modern culture were profoundly marked by his expert knowledge of antiquity. Ivanov had studied ancient history for nine semesters at the University of Berlin (beginning in 1886), and then spent three years at the German Archeological Institute in Rome and one year at the German Archeological Institute in Athens. Though he ultimately turned away from a career in the academy, Ivanov’s formidable training in ancient (and modern) languages and cultures is reflected throughout his creative work. His theories about theater had an enormous impact on the Russian avant-garde and even on early Soviet theatrical experiments.

Michael A. Wachtel is chair and professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1990. His scholarship focuses on Russian poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. A comparatist by training and inclination, he is particularly interested in German-Russian literary and cultural relations. He has received numerous distinctions, among them the Likhachev Foundation Fellowship, in 2010; a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 2007; and the prize for best new book in literary/cultural studies by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, in 1999, for The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings (Cambridge, 1998). Wachtel’s other books include Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis, and the Poetics of Vyacheslav Ivanov (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry (Cambridge, 2004), and, as editor, Vjačeslav Ivanov, Dichtung und Briefwechsel aus dem deutschsprachigen Nachlaß (Liber Verlag, 1995), and Vyacheslav Ivanov, Selected Essays (Northwestern, 2001).