University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

The poet Benedikt Livshits (1887-1938) was a pioneer of Russian futurism who became a victim of Stalin's terror. His work has been unduly neglected both in Russia and abroad. This book is the first monograph about Livshits to appear in any country. I have been fascinated by Livshits since graduate school and have tried to rescue him from oblivion in two of my own books. In Baudelaire in Russia (1996) I discussed Livshits' unusual translations of Baudelaire's poetry, and in Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (2003) I analyze his prose poem "People in a Landscape," which is an interesting attempt to create a work of verbal cubism.