Mayya Kucherskaya

Russian writer, literary scholar, and literary critic. She was born in Moscow. She studied at School No. 1567. In 1987, she entered the Russian Department of the Faculty of Philology at Lomonosov Moscow State University, graduating in 1992. She then studied in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), graduating in 1995. In 1997, she defended her candidate’s dissertation at Moscow State University, titled “The Russian Christmas Story and the Problem of the Canon in Modern Literature.” She defended her second dissertation in 1999 at the University of California on the topic “Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich Romanov in Russian Cultural Mythology” (“Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich Romanov in Russian Cultural Mythology”). She teaches at the State University–Higher School of Economics, where she is an associate professor and deputy head of the Department of Literature, and gives courses including “The System of Western Literature,” “Russian Literature of the Second Half of the 19th Century,” and others.