Mikhail Gasparov

Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov was a Russian literary scholar and classical philologist, historian of ancient literature and Russian poetry, translator (from ancient and modern languages), prosodist, and literary theorist. He was an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was the author of fundamental works on Russian and European verse, a translator of ancient, medieval, and modern poetry and prose, and an essayist.

Mikhail Gasparov was born in 1935 in Moscow. His mother, Elena Aleksandrovna Nurenberg, worked as an editor for the magazine Bezbozhnik. He learned the identity of his father, who also worked for Bezbozhnik and later became an editor at the publishing house of the USSR Academy of Sciences, only when he was already an adult. His stepfather, mining engineer Leo Gasparov, was from Nagorno-Karabakh; Elena Nurenberg and Leo Gasparov divorced when M. L. Gasparov was still a child.

He graduated from Moscow Secondary School No. 12 (1952) and from the Classical Department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (1957). He was a Candidate of Philological Sciences (1962, dissertation: “Ancient Literary Fable”), Doctor of Philological Sciences (1979, with the monograph “Modern Russian Verse: Metrics and Rhythmics” submitted as his dissertation), Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from December 15, 1990, in the Department of Literature and Language (literary scholarship), and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences from June 11, 1992. From 1957 to 1990 he worked in the ancient literature section of the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; from 1971 to 1981 he headed the section. He took part in the work of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School and the mathematics and philology circle of Academician A. N. Kolmogorov. He was one of the organizers and a professor at the Department of the History and Theory of World Culture of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University (1990–1994 and from 1997), and also taught at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute.

Since 1990 he had been chief research fellow in the Department of