"I am to be read not from left to right, but in Jewish: from right to left"

Marat Grinberg (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2006) is Assistant Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His recent essays include "The Problem of Evil': an Exchange with Tony Judt" (The New York Review of Books, 2008); "'All the Young Poets have Become Old Jews': Boris Slutsky's Russian Jewish Canon" (East European Jewish Affairs, 2007) and "The Midrash from Joseph: 'Isaac and Abraham' as Brodsky's Ur-Text" in Poetics. Self. Place: Essays in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone (Bloomington, Slavica, 2007).

• Preface: Not Quite Platonov: toward a History of Misinterpreting the Poet. Poet-Interpreter/Translator-Scribe. Part One: Historiography. 1. The Ur-Suite of 1940/41: ‘Poems about Jews and Tatars”. 2. The Poet-Historian: Transplantation Added. 3. A Blessed Curse: The Midrash of 1947-53. 4. Looking at the Burned Planet: the Post-Holocaust Verse. 5. The Resurrected Remnant: of Horses and Metapoetics. Part Two: Polemics. 6. Writing the Jew: the Poetics of the Father. 7. On Account of the Elegy: within Cemetery Walls. 8. Conversing about God: the Judaic Poetics. Part Three: Intertexts. 9. Among the Objectivists: Charles Reaznikoff. 10. Blindness and no Insight: David Samoilov. 11. Leader of leaders and mentor of mentors”: Il’ia Sel’vinskii. 12. “Weighty proofs of the unprovable”: Ian Satunovskii. 13. The Final Myth: Pushkin. Conclusion: The Reader in Perpetuity.

“Boris Slutsky, according to this brilliant book, accomplished the seemingly impossible: a poet of Soviet times, he reforged the totality of Russian literary culture, from Church Slavonic to Pushkin to Khlebnikov and beyond, within the crucible of Jewish self-understanding. Marat Grinberg, author of this impressive study, has also accomplished the seemingly impossible. He demonstrates how this supremely Russian poet can and must be read in his totality: “from right to left,” from beginning to end, and from his desk drawer to Red Square.”