Lazar Fleishman

Lazar Fleishman was born to a Jewish family in Ovruch, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His parents were Pesia (Halle), a physician, and Solomon Fleishman, an artist. He attended the Academy of Music in Riga, Latvia, before graduating from the Latvian State University in 1966. He earned a PhD in 1968 from the State University of Tartu and Latvian Statue University. Fleishman emigrated to Israel in 1974 and was a senior lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1984, he moved to the USA, where he became associate professor of comparative literature and Slavic studies at Stanford University and full professor in 1985. He served as chair of the Department of Slavic Studies from 1992 to 1994. He was a visiting professor of Slavic studies at many universities in the USA, Russia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic. Prof. Fleishman's research interests included the history of 19th and 20th century Russian literature, especially Alexander Pushkin, Boris Pasternak, and Russian modernism. He spent several decades conducting extensive research on the life and work of Pasternak and has written several meticulously detailed biographical works on him. He won the Boris Pasternak Prize in 2004 and the Humboldt Research Award in both 1994 and 2000. He is the editor of the series Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures and History and co-editor of the series Verbal Art: Studies in Poetics.