A Cultural Hero of the Soviet Era Looks to the Future

By PETER MONAGHAN

Now at Emory, Mikhail Epstein envisions new modes of thought in the humanities

For the past decade, an intellectual and cultural hero from Soviet-era Moscow has been quietly producing ambitious and varied research here, on the edge of Emory University's leafy suburban campus, in a converted house that is the home of the Russian department.

Mikhail N. Epstein, whom the eminent Sovietologist Walter Laqueur has called "probably the most important figure in Russian literary theory"