Mikhail Naumovich Epstein (also transliterated Epshtein; ; born 21 April 1950) is a Russian-American literary scholar, essayist, and cultural theorist best known for his contributions to the study of Russian postmodernism. He is the Emeritus S. C. Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His writings encompass Russian literature and intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, the creation of new ideas in the age of electronic media, semiotics, and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities. His works have been translated into over 26 languages.
The Modern Language Association of America awarded Epstein the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures for his book Ideas Against Ideocracy: Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991) on 6 December 2023.
Biography Mikhail Naumovich Epstein was born 21 April 1950 in Moscow, USSR, the only child of Naum Moiseevich Epstein, an accountant, and Maria Samuilovna Lifshits, an economist at Transport Publishing House. He graduated from the Department of Philology at Moscow State University in 1972 with a degree in Russian and spent the next six years as a researcher at the Department of Theoretical Problems, World Literature Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1978, he joined the Union of Soviet Writers. Epstein also began to explore Moscow's underground poetry and art scene of the 1970s, developing a lifelong interest in conceptualism, metarealism, and the cross-cultural interplay of ideas.
Throughout the 1980s, Epstein actively engaged with Moscow's intellectual life. He founded the Essayists' Club in 1982. In 1986, as President Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost permitted more open questioning of Soviet cultural orthodoxies, Epstein established the Image and Thought association, which later gave rise to the Bank of New Ideas and Terms and the Laboratory of Contemporary Culture groups in Moscow. He was awarded the St. Petersburg-based Andrei Bely Prize for Research in the Humanities in 1991.
In 1990, Epstein emigrated to the United States, where he spent a semester teaching at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, before joining the faculty of the Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Almost immediately, he received a year-long fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars(Washington, D.C.) to research Soviet ideological language. Upon his return to Emory, Epstein taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses in subjects ranging from literary theory, semiotics, and intellectual history to 19th-and 20th-century Russian literature.
From 1992 to 1994, Epstein researched the history of Russian thought of the late Soviet period thanks to a grant from the National Council for Soviet and East European Research.
In the second half of the 1990s, as the World Wide Web rapidly permeated both academic and popular culture, Epstein embraced the new medium for cross-cultural communication. His internet projects during this time include The InteLnet (Intellectual Network), 1995 "The Book of Books" (since 1998), and "The Gift of a Word: The Projective Lexicon of the Russian Language" (since 2000). InteLnet's Bank of New Ideas was recognized by the Institute for Social Inventions, awarding it the 1995 Creativity Social Innovations Award.
From fall 1999 to the spring of 2001, and again from fall of 2003 to the spring of 2006, Epstein co-chaired the interdisciplinary Gustafson faculty seminar at Emory University.
In the spring of 2011, he was appointed IAS Fellow and Prowse Fellow at Van Mildert College, Durham University Institute of Advanced Study in Durham, U.K. He remained at Durham from 2012 to 2015 as Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Humanities Innovation, where he founded the Repository of New Ideas.
Research and scholarship
Epstein's research interests in the humanities include postmodernism; contemporary philosophy and theology, in particular the philosophy of culture and language; the poetics and history of Russian literature; the semiotics of everyday life, and the evolution of language.
Russian postmodernism Epstein pioneered the study of Russian postmodernism, affirming its place in global postmodernity. In his books After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (1995) and Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, 1999, 2015), he situated Russian fiction, poetry, art and spirituality of the 1970s–1990s both along the continuum of metaphysically oriented metarealism and linguistically self–reflective conceptualism, and in the context of the global postmodern literary-cultural conversation. According to Epstein, the first wave of Russian postmodernism harkened back to Soviet-era socialist realism of the 1930s–1950s, which opposed the "obsolete" aesthetic individualism of modernism, erased distinctions between elite and mass culture, and tried to construct a post-historical space where all the great discourses of the past could be merged and resolved.
Socialist realism managed to erase semantic differences between idea and reality, the signifier and the signified. Despite these commonalities, socialist realism lacked the playful, ironically self-conscious aspect of mature postmodernism. It was not until the late 1950s and again the 1970s that Soviet artists and writers such as Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, Aleksandr Melamid, Dmitri Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and others turned a distinctly postmodern, playful, ironic gaze toward the ideological simulations of socialist realism (heroic workers, collective struggle, communal apartment, the glorious communist future, etc.).
Instead of denouncing Soviet ideology as a lie, Russian postmodern writers and artists viewed ideas or concepts in and of themselves as the only true substance of the Soviet way of life. Thus, Epstein presents two separate phases of Russian postmodernism: "naïve" — socialist realism, and "reflective" — conceptualism. These two Russian postmodernisms, in effect, both complement and contradict each other due to a significant historical gap. In contrast, the development of Western postmodernism was more straightforward and less complex, concentrated within a single historical period.
Transculturalism Epstein has written and lectured extensively on culturology and its outgrowth, transculture. As a distinct field of study, culturology developed in the 1960s–1970s, in parallel to cultural studies in the West and in opposition to the dominant Marxist philosophy of the Soviet era. Advanced from different angles by thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Juri Lotman, and Sergei Averintsev, culturology investigates, describes, and links diverse cultural phenomena previously approached from separate fields such as history, philosophy, sociology, literary and art criticism. It seeks to rise above social, national, and historical distinctions, examining both "culture" as an integral whole and "cultures" as diverse, infinitely rich and intrinsically valuable sites of encoding human phenomena.
Epstein built on the foundation of culturology with his conception of transculturalism, a conscious liberation from the strictures of one's own specific, inherently incomplete culture and cultivation of a radical openness toward and dialogue with others. For Epstein, emigration provided an opportunity to study the interaction of cultures firsthand. He describes the transcultural model as distinct from both the American "melting pot", in which cultural distinctions are merged and subsumed into a national norm, and multiculturalism, which posits pride in discrete cultural identities based on racial, ethnic, or sexual differences. According to Epstein, "Transculture is an emerging sphere where humans position themselves free from the limitations of the primary culture(s) of their home environment. The elements of transculture are freely chosen by people rather than dictated by rules and prescriptions within their given cultures." Transculture acknowledges the need to see the self in the other, allowing the multiplication of possible worlds, a boundless fluidity of discourses, values, and knowledge systems that would embrace difference rather than seek to obliterate it.
This insight inspired Epstein to revisit the collective improvisation events he had conducted at the Club of Essayists and Center for Experimental Creativity in Moscow in the 1980s. Epstein held similar "collective brainstorming" events as laboratory models of transcultural activity at Bowling Green State University (1996), the international conference "The Future of the Humanities. International School of Theory in Humanities", Santiago de Compostela University (1997) and Emory University (1998–2004). These participatory improvisational sessions aimed to "explore creativity, technology, and the role of spirituality in everyday mental processes".
Minimal religion / "poor faith" Epstein's research on post-Soviet Russian cultural and spiritual conditions brought him to the concept of "minimal religion", a phenomenon of post-atheist religiosity originating in the first country to experience 70 years of mass, state-sanctioned atheism. Apart from the significant number of Russians who turned to traditional Russian Orthodox practice or other faiths (Judaism, Protestant Christianity, Islam, etc.) in the 1970s–1990s, roughly a quarter of Russian poll respondents profess a general belief in God that is unaffiliated with any organized church or religious doctrine. In abandoning atheism, these "minimal believers" seek to fill a spiritual void with a holistic view of God, above and beyond the historic divisions and prescriptive rituals of organized religion.https://philpapers.org/archive/EPSPAT-2.pdf, p. 74-75 However, in contrast to Western secular humanism or agnosticism, Epstein posits minimal religion in Russia as essentially theistic. His term "poor faith" refers not to inadequacy but freedom from the material trappings of traditional religions: possessions, buildings, ritual objects, and intermediaries between the individual and God.Epstein, Mikhail., Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka., Genis, Aleksandr. Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. United Kingdom: Berghahn Books, 1999. p. 386 The minimal believer possesses only faith in the here and now, without any institutional forms or organizations (as distinct from Protestant denominations).
Furthermore, Epstein emphasizes that Soviet mass atheism was a necessary prerequisite to the rebirth of faith in the form of minimal religion. "Atheism had used the diversity of religions to argue for the relativity of religion. Consequently, the demise of atheism signaled the return to the simplest, virtually empty, and infinite form of monotheism and monofideism. If God is one, then faith must be one."
Transformative humanities