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Irene Masing-Delic

Professor Emerita Irene Masing-Delic studied Russian Literature in Uppsala and Stockholm and received her Ph.D. at Stockholm University in 1971 and docentur in 1974. After teaching in various countries and in various languages (at the Australian National University, the Friedrich-Alexander University at Erlangen-Nürnberg, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa), she settled at The Ohio State University, Columbus, where she taught for twenty-five years. She retired from OSU in 2012 with emerita status and took up residence in Durham, North Carolina. In 2013 she became Editor of the Slavic and East European Journal which was hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during 2013—2018. Professor Delic currently has a Research Professor position in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at UNC, Chapel Hill.

Professor Delic’s interests in Russian literature include the poetry of the “Silver Age” (Blok, Pasternak, Zabolotskii) and religious and utopian-(pseudo-)scientific thought (Abolishing Death, 1992, now revised and translated into Russian as Uprazdnenie smerti, 2020), specifically the utopian-religious thinker Nikolai Fedorov who envisioned a conquest of death through science and collective labor guided by Russian Orthodoxy. Among the classics, she has focused on Dostoevsky and Turgenev and among Soviet writers Pilnyak, Zoshchenko, Babel’ and Gor’kii. The relations between the intelligentsia and religious thinkers are a recent interest. Her current major project is a book on Nabokov’s (Sirin’s) Russian prose. 

View Articles:

Incompatible Collaborators: Gor'kii, Khodasevich, and “Belfast” (1924-26)

Biology, Reason, and Literature in Zoscenko’s “Pered Voschodon Solnca”