Slavic Languages Expert - Gregory Freidin

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Gregory Freidin
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Biography

Gregory Freidin's interests include contemporary Russian culture, literature, politics and society. He is now completing his long-standing project on the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel, including a definitive annotated edition of Babel's writings, letters, reminiscences and critical reception (W.W. Norton, forthcoming); a collection of essays on Babel's works and days (The Enigma of Isaac Babel, 2008); and finally, his own critical biography of the writer (A Jew on Horseback: Isaac Babel in Life and Art, forthcoming).  This will be Freidin’s second critical biography of a major Russian author; his first, Coat of Many Colors, a study of the life and oeuvre of the poet Osip Mandelstam, came out in 1987.  In 2004, as part of his Isaac Babel project, Freidin organized an international conference at Stanford and, along with it, produced the U.S. premiere of Isaac Babel's play "Maria" and curated an exhibition on Babel. 

After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978, Freidin began his career at Stanford as Assistant Professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literature, earning tenure in 1985.

Shortly after emigrating to the United States in 1971, as a stringer for Time magazine, Freidin transcribed and, along with Strobe Talbott, translated into English the second volume of Nikita Khrushchev’s Memoirs (Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, 1973). Since 1988, Freidin has been a frequent visitor to Russia, doing research in Russian literature as well as observing and reporting on the recent developments in Russian culture, politics, and society. His columns have appeared in large-circulation publications in the United States and Russia (The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, and others). In 1990, at the request of President George Bush, Freidin translated into Russian The Federalist Papers, the first ever such edition in Russian, for presentation to President Mikhail Gorbachev. This translation, the first ever edition of The Federalist Papers in Russian, was initiated by President George Bush as a gift for President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then working on a new Soviet constitution, the Union Treaty, to be adopted in August 1991. That month, Freidin and his wife, Victoria E. Bonnell, found themselves participant observers in the protests against the overthrow of Gorbachev’s government. They later included their reminiscences in a book that they co-edited with the then NPR Moscow bureau chief, Ann Cooper.  Bonnell and Freidin collaborated on a study of television’s role in the defeat of the Coup (“Televorot,” 1994) and are now collaborating on a book-length study, tentatively entitled Conjuring up a New Russia: Symbols, Rituals, and Mythologies of National Identity, 1991-2002.

In 1995, along with former Stanford colleague, Robert Ball, Freidin founded a Moscow publishing venture, The Russian Britannica LLC., which has since evolved, under the Soros Foundation management, into an on-line Russian encyclopedia, Krugosvet.

As a commentator on Russian politics and culture, Freidin has appeared on the BBC, McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, NPR, and KQED. In recent years, Freidin has been reviewing and writing on contemporary Russian film for the Telluride Film Festival selection committee and its journal.

 

Key Works

  • The Norton Critical Edition of Isaac Babel’s Selected Writings, Letters, Contemporary Views, Criticism, Scholarship, and Chronology. Ed., with an introduction, annotations, a critical essay, and chronology by G. Freidin.  W. W. Norton, forthcoming.
  • A Jew on Horseback: Isaac Babel and His Worlds.  Stanford University Press, forthcoming. 
  • The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context. Ed. Gregory Freidin. Stanford University Press, 2008 (in press).
  • Russia at the End of the Twentieth Century: Culture and Its Horizons in Politics and Society.  Ed. Gregory Freidin. Stanford, 2000. 
  • Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Moscow Coup.  Eds. Victoria Bonnell, Ann Copper and Gregory Freidin. Introduction by Victoria Bonnell and Gregory Freidin.  M.E. Sharpe, 1994.
  • Russian Culture in Transition (Selected Papers of the International Working Group for the Study of Russian Culture, 1990 1991). Compiled, edited, and with an Introduction by Gregory Freidin. Stanford Slavic Studies 7 (1993).
  • A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self Presentation.  University of California Press, 1987.

 

Prof. Freidin in the News