Cries in the New Wilderness

Mikhail Epstein was born in Moscow in 1950 and graduated from Moscow State University summa cum laude in philology in 1972. He was the founder and director of the Laboratory of Contemporary Culture in Moscow. In 1990, Epstein moved to the United States, where he spent a year in Washington, D.C., as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. He is now Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University.

Epstein's recent books in English include After the Future: Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture; Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with two coauthors); and Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (with Ellen Berry). He is the author of 15 books and approximately 400 essays and articles, translated into 14 languages. In 2000, Mikhail Epstein was the recipient of the Liberty Prize, established in 1999 and awarded once a year to prominent Russian cultural figures who have made an outstanding contribution to American society. He has also received, among many other awards, the 1995 Social Innovations Award from the Institute for Social Inventions (London) for his electronic Bank of New Ideas, and the 1991 Andrei Belyi Prize (St. Petersburg) for the best work in literary criticism and scholarship.

Eve Adler is professor of Classics at Middlebury College in Vermont. She has authored (with Vladimir Shlyakhov) Russian Slang & Colloquial Expressions and translated from German Philosophy and Law by Leo Strauss.