MIKHL (MIKHAIL) KRUTIKOV

MIKHL (MIKHAIL) KRUTIKOV (b. 1957)

            A scholar of literature, he was born in Moscow. In 1979 he graduated from the mechanics and mathematics department of Moscow State University, and until 1989 he worked as a programmer. From the early 1980s he became interested in literature in Hebrew and Yiddish. He debuted in print in 1986 in the journal Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland) in Moscow. Over the years 1989-1991, he worked for the editorial board of this journal, turning his attention to preparing the youth supplement to the journal, Yungvald (Young forest). At the same time, he studied with the “Yidish” (Yiddish) group at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and contributed to the Riga journal Vestnik Evreiskoi Kul'tury (Bulletin of Jewish culture). He was a student, 1991-1995, at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where in 1997 he defended his doctoral dissertation in the field of the history of Yiddish literature in the early twentieth century. From 1996 until 2001, he worked at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish-language research and until 2002 he taught Yiddish literature in the school of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He was a member, 1997-1999, of the editorial board of the journal Di pen (The pen) in Oxford. From 1999 he worked as a European correspondent for the Forverts (Forward) newspaper in New York; in it he published articles on literature and cultural themes. Since 2003 he has been a professor at the University of Michigan. He is the author of academic writings in Yiddish, English, and Russian.

His books include: Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 248 pp.; From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 392 pp.; Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).

Chaim Beider, Leksikon fun yidishe shrayber in ratn-farband (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union), ed. Boris Sandler and Gennady Estraikh (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, Inc., 2011), p. 342.