Fleishman Lazar Solomonovich (1944)

Fleishman (Fleischmann) Lazar (Lasar) Solomonovich (born 1944) - literary scholar and specialist in Russian literature.

Lazar Fleishman was born in evacuation during the Second World War; in October 1944 his family returned to Riga. His father was an artist and his mother a laboratory physician. He studied at the Emīls Dārziņš Music School and the Jāzeps Mediņš Music College, and in 1966 graduated with distinction from the Latvian State University with a degree in Russian language and literature.

During his university years he wrote his first scholarly article for a student “Pushkin Collection,” was a member of the student Pushkin Society at the university founded by L. S. Sidyakov, and belonged to the circle of young philologists associated with Yuri Lotman at the University of Tartu. In January 1974 he emigrated to Israel, where he began working at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1985 he has been a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University.

As a visiting professor he has lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Texas, the Russian State University for the Humanities, the University of Latvia, and Charles University in Prague. His courses have covered the history of Russian poetry from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, various periods of Russian literary history, as well as textual scholarship and versification. His research interests spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular focus on Alexander Pushkin and Boris Pasternak, the literary and cultural life of the Russian émigré community, and the cultural connections between Russian, Baltic, Jewish, and Polish traditions. A central theme of his work, based on meticulous archival research, is the study of Pasternak’s works.

Fleishman organized numerous international conferences and symposia devoted to Pasternak’s work and Russian literary culture, including the symposium “Russian Culture in the Baltic States in the Interwar Period” (Riga, 2001), organized together with B. Ravdin, a jubilee Pushkin conference (Stanford, 1999), and “Abram Tertz: Good Night, Soviet Civilization!” (Stanford, 1992). He also organized a series of lectures at Stanford featuring representatives of the creative and scholarly intelligentsia from Latvia and other Baltic countries. He is a member of the editorial boards of several international Slavic studies journals and one of the founders of the series “Slavica Hierosolymitana” (Jerusalem), “Modern Russian Literature and Culture” (Berkeley), and “Stanford Slavic Studies.”

Among the documentary collections he prepared are Russian Berlin [Русский Берлин] (Paris, 1983; Paris–Moscow, 2003, with R. Hughes and O. Raevskaya-Hughes), The Russian Press in Riga: From the History of the Newspaper “Segodnya” in the 1930s [Русская печать в Риге: Из истории газеты «Сегодня» 1930-х годов] (vols. 1–5, Stanford, 1997–1998, with Yu. I. Abyzov and B. A. Ravdin), and The Russian-Baltic Collection [Русско-балтийский сборник] (2 vols., Stanford, 2004–2006, with B. A. Ravdin). He is the author of major monographs on Pasternak, including Boris Pasternak in the 1920s [Борис Пастернак в двадцатые годы] (Munich, 1981; St. Petersburg, 2005), Boris Pasternak in the 1930s [Борис Пастернак в тридцатые годы] (Jerusalem, 1984), and Boris Pasternak and the Literary Movement of the 1930s [Борис Пастернак и литературное движение 1930-х годов] (Moscow, 2006), as well as In the Grip of Provocation: Operation “Trust” and the Russian Émigré Press [В тисках провокации: Операция «Трест» и русская зарубежная печать] (Moscow, 2003) and From Pushkin to Pasternak: Selected Works on the Poetics and History of Russian Literature [От Пушкина к Пастернаку: Избранные работы по поэтике и истории русской литературы] (Moscow, 2006).

He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Prize (1995), and the Boris Pasternak Prize (2004).