Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 1, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Marat Grinberg. Moderated by Mark Lipovetsky.
Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002) stands as one of the most original and uncompromising voices in twentieth century Russian literature. His novels blend fiction, philosophy, religion, and politics in a way that is unmistakably Russian, yet he tackles these very same issues as a Jewish writer, a Jewish thinker, and a fiercely independent Jewish voice. This talk will analyze Gorenstein’s philosophy and artistry through his masterwork, the novel Psalm, written in Moscow in the 1970s and published in Andrew Bromfield’s English translation in 2026. Psalm is a bold metaphysical narrative which follows Dan the antichrist and the executor of God’s will. As he travels through the Soviet landscapes, witnessing their devastation, he sets a cosmic drama into motion, punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous. The talk will present Psalm as specifically a work of Soviet Jewish imagination, on the one hand, and speculative fiction, on the other, which contributed to the rich world of Soviet and East European science fiction from Stanisław Lem to the Strugatsky brothers.
Marat Grinberg graduated from the Joint degree program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1999, and received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2006. He is a scholar of Jewish literature and cinema, 20th century Russian literature, and the history and poetics of science fiction. He’s the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at Creighton University; prior to that he was a Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College. Grinberg is the author of “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011), Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016), Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen (2015), and, most recently, The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (2023). He is the translator and editor of Mikhail Goldis’s Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine published in 2025. Grinberg’s essays have appeared in such national venues as Tablet Magazine, Jewish Journal, Mosaic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cineaste. Currently he’s working on a large study of Jewishness and the Holocaust in Russian, Ukrainian, and East European speculative fiction of the Soviet era to be published by Rutgers University Press. He’s the author of the afterword to Friedrich Gorenstein’s Psalm.
