Vadim Shneyder
Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Department:
Department of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Languages & CulturesPhone: 310-825-7894
Email:
vadim@humnet.ucla.edu
Biography
Vadim Shneyder is Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, which he joined in 2015 after receiving his PhD from Yale University. He studies Russian literature of the age of realism—a period spanning roughly the second half of the nineteenth century—in its relation to its intellectual, social, and ideological contexts, both in the Russian Empire and Europe. Beyond the study of nineteenth-century prose, his research extends to a number of topics, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and Russian philosophy and aesthetic theory, Soviet literature and film, and national and cultural identity in Eastern Europe. His first book,
Russia’s Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov (Northwestern University Press, 2020) investigates how the Russian realist prose tradition confronted the representational challenges posed by nascent capitalism. In a situation of threatening and unprecedented change, literature did not passively reflect existing economic conditions so much as it helped to define what Russian capitalism could mean.
Research Interests
- Nineteenth-century Russian literature, culture, and intellectual history, esp. Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, and Chekhov
- Theory of the novel
- Realist aesthetics and the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realisms
- Nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy and cultural theory
- National and transnational postmodernisms in Russia, Eastern Europe, and beyond
- Soviet film, especially of the 1920s-1930s and the Thaw
- Literature and culture of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s
- Soviet ideology and policy towards the non-Slavic peoples
- Russian and Soviet Jewish culture
- Russian and European literature and capitalism
Website