Culture Connection: Pushkin Is Our Everything

William Mills Todd III (born 1944) is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Literature (emeritus) at Harvard University. He studied at Dartmouth College, the University of Oxford, Leningrad State University, and Columbia University. The central concern of his teaching and scholarship, apart from closely analyzing great texts, has been studying aspects of literary life: writing, reading, criticizing, censoring, publishing. His five books and ninety articles focus on narrative and cultural studies; Russian, English, and French literature of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries; Russian fiction and social history; sociology of literature, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky. The books include The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin, and The Sociology of Literature: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (in Russian). His favorite articles are “Dostoevsky as a Professional Writer,” “Eugene Onegin: ‘Life’s Novel’,” “The Ruse of the Russian Novel,” “Anna on the Installment Plan,” and “The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Serial Publication.” He is presently writing a book on the serialization of nineteenth-century novels. He has taught lecture courses and seminars on world literature, western culture, medieval Russian literature, nineteenth-century Russian fiction, theory of narrative, institutions of literature, Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky.