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).