Agenda

Interview

1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.

Yuri Leving (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University) specializes in
contemporary Russian literature and film, Eastern European cinema, the visual arts, and digital
humanities. Leving has published 11 monographs and 9 edited collections, including Nabokov in
Motion (2022), A Revolution of the Visible (2018), Marketing Literature and Posthumous
Legacies (2013), Lolita: The Story of a Cover Girl – Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and
Design (2013), Anatomy of a Short Story (2012), and Keys to ‘The Gift’. A Guide to Vladimir
Nabokov’s Novel (2011). In his scholarly works, he often examines the visual poetics of the text,
anything from book covers to children’s animation and celebrity Instagram stories. In addition to
experimenting in the field of digital humanities, he has published books on Vladimir Nabokov,
Joseph Brodsky, and Osip Mandel’stam. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research
Fellow at Heidelberg University and an affiliated research fellow at the American Academy in
Rome. He is also the founding editor of the Nabokov Online Journal. The American Association of
Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) has named Yuri Leving the 2017
recipient of the award for Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship, and most recently he became
the Guggenheim Fellow (2023).

2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and
teaching stay.

My proposed research at the Ca’ Foscari University will focus on a particular work of modernist
non-fiction, Joseph Brodsky’s masterpiece on Venice, “Watermark”. In my previous research,
contextually related to the present field although different in terms of methodology and projected
outcome, I have explored the textological riddles and immediate context of Brodsky’s Acqua Alta.
The status of this essay, composed during 1989, can be compared with Death in Venice by Thomas
Mann in German literature. The scope of my analysis includes unpublished drafts, plans,
sketches, edited printed materials, and Brodsky’s private and business correspondence
regarding publication of that Italian essay as a book. Brodsky’s work is now part and
parcel of any syllabus in the American and Russian non-fiction literature courses in North
American and European universities. The Ca’ Foscari University’s research will enable me to
develop new research questions as well as to experiment with new methods and theoretical ideas for
studying and teaching complex literary works requiring an extensive scholarly apparatus such as
commentary, glossary, visual aids, chronology, and bibliography.

3. Have you ever had a research collaboration with the teaching staff of Department of
Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies in the past?

I have a long-term academic relationship with Professor Evgeny Dobrenko and Professor
Alessandro Farsetti at the Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati. I recently had a
pleasure of hosting Professor Alessandro Farsetti at Princeton University for a guest lecture, and we
look forward to a fruitful cooperation between our two departments in the future. I also gave a guest
lecture and held a documentary film screening in Venice, when it was organized by the Department
of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, in 2022.