Simon Karlinsky

Simon Karlinsky (22 September 1924 - 5 July 2009) was an American literary critic, historian and professor of Slavic languages.

Life

Karlinsky was born Semyon Arkadyevich Karlinsky on 22 September 1924, in a Russian émigré enclave in Harbin, Manchuria, into a family of Polish descent. He immigrated to the US in October 1938.^[1][2][3] He attended Belmont High School and Los Angeles City College. He joined the U.S. army in December 1943, where he would work until March 1946,^[2] and worked as an interpreter in Germany in the 1950s.^[1]He studied music at the École Normale de Musique de Paris under Arthur Honegger from 1951 to 1952,^[4] and later at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik under Boris Blacher.^[2] He received his bachelors' degree in Slavic languages and literature from UC Berkeley in 1960. He received his masters' degree from Harvard in 1961, and his doctorate from Berkeley in 1964; his doctoral thesis was about Marina Tsvetaeva.^[1][2] Karlinsky taught at UC Berkeley from 1964 to 1991^[1] He was noted for his writings about Russian emigré literature and homosexuality in Russian literature.^[5] He received the Guggenheim Fellowship twice.^[4] He inspired a character in Eduard Limonov's book Death of Modern Heroes (Russian: Смерть современных героев, romanized: Smert' sovremennykh geroyev).^[3]

Karlinsky was gay, and lived with his husband Peter Carleton for 35 years. The two married in 2008.^[4] He died of congestive heart failure on 5 July 2009.^[1]

Selected works

• Marina Cvetaeva: Her Life and Art (1966)^[2][5]
• Russia's Gay Literature and History, essay (1976)^[5]
• The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol (1976)^[2]
• The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922-1972 (1977)^[2]
• Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (1977, in collaboration with Michael Henry Heim)^[5]
• Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry (1985)^[2]
• Russian Drama from its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin (1985)^[2][5]