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.

Education

• Ph.D., Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California at Berkeley, June,1979. Dissertation: "Time, Identity and Myth in Osip Mandelstam: 1908-1921"
• M.A., Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California at Berkeley, June 1974
• Special Student, Brandeis University, 1972
• The First State Institute of Foreign Languages, Moscow, USSR, 1969-1971
• Secondary School, Moscow, USSR, 1964

Current courses

• Tolstoy's War and Peace
• Paradigms of Society and Culture in Literature and Film

Previous courses

• The Age of Revolution
• Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and the Social Thought of its Time
• Proseminar in Literary Theory and Study of Russian Literature
• Russia and the Other: A Cultural Approach
• Russian Literature and the Literary Milieu of the NEP Period
• Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Paradigm

Selected publications

• Russia at the End of the Twentieth Century: Culture and Its Horizons in Politics and Society. (Papers delivered at the Stanford University Conference, November 1998). Stanford, 2000. Ed. G. Freidin.
• Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Moscow Coup (August 1991), ed. by Victoria Bonnell, Ann Copper and Gregory Freidin. Introduction by Victoria E. Bonnell and Gregory Freidin (M.E. Sharpe, 1994).
• Russian Culture in Transition (Selected Papers of the International Working Group for the Study of Russian Culture, 1990-1991). Compiled, edited, and with an Introduction by Gregory Freidin. Stanford Slavic Studies 7 (1993)
• American Federalists: Hamilton, Madison, Jay. Selections. With an Addendum of The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of the United States. Translated into Russian, annotated and with an Introduction by Gregory Freidin. Leon Lipson, Consultant. Edited by V. & L. Chalidze. Benson, Vt.: Chalidze Publications, 1990.
• A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self, Presentation. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1987.
• Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Trans. and ed. by Strobe Talbott and Gregory Freidin (anonymously). With a foreword by Edward Crankshaw and an Intro. by Jerrold Schecter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. (For acknowledgement of Freidin's translation see Strobe Talbott's Introduction to Khrushchev: The Glasnost Tapes [Little, Brown &Co., 1990], p. viii).

Current projects

After a long detour into Russian contemporary culture, politics and society, Gregory Freidin, has returned to his old flame, the Isaac Babel project, a critical biography - as much of Isaac Babel as of the magnetic and elusive voice animating his compact and fragmented oeuvre. He hopes to finish the manuscript, A Jew on Horseback, in a few months. As a follow-up, he is planning, along with Gabriella Safran and Stephen Zipperstein (History and Jewish Studies), an international conference on Babel for the fall of 2003. Together with the Berkeley sociologist, Victoria E. Bonnell, he has begun research on a book-lingth study, tentatively entitled Conjuring up a New Russia: Symbols, Rituals, and Mythologies of national Identit, 1991-2002.

Professional activities

• The Humanities Institute; Modern Languages Association; American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
• Contributing Editor, Znamia, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (Moscow), 1991-6
• Editor, Stanford Slavic Studies, 1987-