Lazar Fleishman came to Stanford in 1985 after a distinguished career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also been a Visiting Professor at UC-Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, University of Texas at Austin, the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, Charles University in Prague, The University of Vienna and the University of Latvia in his native Riga. His major scholarly interests include 19th and 20th century Russian literature; Boris Pasternak; 20th century Russian emigre and Soviet culture and literary life; Russian avant-garde poetry and art; Russian-Jewish, Russian-Baltic and Russian-Polish cultural relationships; poetics; and archival research.

He is the founder and editor of the series, Stanford Slavic Studies (1987; vol. 50 is forthcoming in 2020). He organized and co-organized a number of high-profile international scholarly events on campus, including the conferences on Aleksandr Pushkin, Andrei Siniavsky, and Boris Pasternak as well as a conference of the historians of Baltic countries and edited or co-edited the collections of papers based on these conferences. His most recent monograph is devoted to the circumstances of the publication of Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago” and the political storm triggered by the 1958 Nobel Prize award in literature to him.