Evgenii V. Bershtein
Professor of Russian
Russian symbolism, the semiotics of Soviet culture, gender and sexuality in Russian culture, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Eisenstein.
MA 1990 Tartu University, Estonia.
PhD 1998 University of California, Berkeley.
Reed College 1999–.
Evgenii (Zhenya) Bershtein grew up in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia, and graduated from Tartu University (Estonia). His PhD is from UC Berkeley. He has held research fellowships at Columbia University (2001-02), Helsinki University (2004, 2005), and University of Cambridge (2014). Evgenii Bershtein has published on eighteenth–century Russian poetry, the cultural and intellectual history of Russian modernism, and on Russian film (you can read some of his work below and on his Academia page, in English and Russian). Most recently, he has edited the English translation of Yuri Lotman's Non-Memoirs (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014) and has been working on a project entitled Eisenstein, Sexuality, and Decadence. Professor Bershtein joined the Reed faculty in 1999, and he teaches classes on twentieth-century Russian literature and culture, Russian and European Symbolism, Russian film, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Eisenstein, as well as the Russian language at the intermediate and advanced levels.
Publications
Zhenya's recent essays, available online:
- on the notion of universal bisexuality in Russian religious philosophy (in English)
- on Eduard Bagritsky's poem "February" and Jewish masculinity (in English)
- on Alexander Sokurov's melancholy athletes
- on the historical poetics of Russian gay literature (in English) (the same essay in Russian)
- on writer Vladimir Sorokin and the Putinist Youth (in English, co-authored with Jesse Hadden '09)
- on Gus Van Sant's film "Milk"
- on the Rozanov line in Russian literature
- on Tatyana Tolstaya's non-fiction
- on Dan Healey's book Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia
- on the HBO series "Sex and the City"
- on post-Soviet decadence
- on the cult of Otto Weininger in Russia
- on the poet Mikhail Kuzmin's diary