COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM

Ilya Kutik (Ph.D., Stockholm University, 1994) is a renowned poet and a founder of Russian Metarealism in poetry. His poems are translated into 19 languages and included in the major anthologies of Russian poetry of the 20^th century. He is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry in Russian: The Pentathlon of Senses (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1990); Swedish Poets: Translations and Variations (Moscow: Mir Kultury, MP Fortuna LTD, 1992); Odysseus Bow (St. Petersburg: Sovetskii Pisatel, 1993), Ode on Visiting the Belosaraisk Spit on the Sea of Azov (bilingual edition, Russian, English trans. by Kit Robinson, New York: Alef, 1995); Death of Tragedy, in 2 volumes: Persian Letters (vol. 1) and Civil Wars (vol. 2) (Moscow: Kommentarii, 2003), and Epos (Moscow: Russkii Gulliver, 2011). He is also a translator of English (A. Pope, G. K. Chesterton), American (E. Pound, A. Ginsberg), Polish (C. Norwid), and Swedish (E. Stagnelius, T. Tranströmer, L. Gustavsson) poetry.

He is the author of many critical essays on Russian and European poetry from the18^th through the 21^st century, and has published three books of literary criticism in English: The Ode and the Odic: Essays on Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Mayakovsky (Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1994), Hieroglyphs of Another World: On Poetry, Swedenborg, and Other Matters (2000), and Writing as Exorcism: The Personal Codes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol (2004; both from Northwestern University Press).

Kutik is currently completing two book-length projects: META: Reader to Russian Poetic Thinking (co–authored with Reginald Gibbons) and Visa to Byzantium: Understanding of Byzantine Culture in the 21^st Century. Kutik teaches multiple graduate courses on Russian poetry as well as undergraduate courses on the 19^th-century Russian Literature (Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov) and film–courses (on the theories of Russian montage and the film–aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky).