Aleksandr Chudakov

Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov was born on February 2, 1938, in Shchuchinsk, Kazakh SSR, into a teachers’ family. He was a Russian literary scholar and writer, a specialist in Chekhov. In 1960, he graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University. From 1964 he worked at the Institute of World Literature and taught at Moscow State University and the Gorky Literary Institute. He earned a Doctor of Philology degree in 1983. Beginning in 1987, he also served as a visiting professor at the universities of Hamburg, Michigan, Middlebury, Los Angeles, and Princeton, as well as at the Institute of Foreign Languages in Seoul. He has been published as a historian of Russian literature since 1959 in such journals as Voprosy Literatury, Novy Mir, and Literaturnoye Obozreniye. He published the memoir “Asking Shklovsky” (Literaturnoye Obozreniye, 1990, No. 6). He compiled collections of works by Yu. N. Tynyanov (Moscow, 1977; together with E. Toddes and M. Chudakova), A. P. Chekhov (Moscow, 1980; 1984), and V. B. Shklovsky (Moscow, 1990; together with A. Galushkin). His book Poetics of Chekhov was published in English (1983). In addition, he published more than two hundred articles on the history of Russian literature. As a prose writer, he made his debut with the novel-idyll The Twilight Settles on the Old Steps in the magazine Znamya (2000, No. 10). As A. Nemzer said, “one wants to quote Alexander Chudakov’s ‘novel-idyll’ page after page, and to retell it sensibly is probably impossible... It is an amazing book about how true Russia survived under Bolshevik rule, about why we are alive and have not lost our sense of freedom, about what we have irretrievably lost” (Vremya Novostey, 27 November 2000). He was a member of the USSR Writers’ Union (1977), the International Chekhov Society (1989), and the editorial boards of the journals Novoye Literaturnoye