Marcus Levitt

Professor Emeritus, Slavic Languages and Literatures

University of Southern California

Marcus Levitt grew up in Brooklyn. He attended Brooklyn Friends School, Haverford College and Columbia University, where he got his PhD in Russian. Before coming to USC, where he worked for 32 years, he taught in Columbia's Literature-Humanities Program and served for a year as Visiting Professor at Duke University. He has spent several years living and doing research in Russia and the former Soviet Union, where his works appear regularly. One main thrust of his scholarly writing has been to better understand the genesis of a “modern” west-European style literature in Russia, and he has written on a broad spectrum of Russian writers from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. His first book, "Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880" (1989), considered the cultural context for Alexander Pushkin’s elevation of to the rank of Russian “national poet.” His most recent, prize-winning monograph, "The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia" (2011), examines early modern Russia’s demand to be seen and its paradoxical lack of visibility in the later tradition. In between these books he co-edited path-breaking collections on sex and violence ("Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture" [1999] and "Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture" [2007]), as well as a volume in the series Dictionary of Literary Biography on "Early Modern Russian Writers" (vol. 150, 1995). He also co-edited a volume of articles entitled: "Demonocracy: The Satirical Journals of the Russian Revolution 1905" with Oleg Minin (a special issue of the journal Experiment / Эксперимент,19 (2013), Brill Publishing. In 2023 he was awarded the prize for “Outstanding Contribution to Scholarship” from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages (AATSEEL).

Prof. Levitt has also translated several important works of contemporary Russian scholarship into English, including those by Victor Zhivov, Boris Uspensky, and Andrei Zorin. Among his other scholarly activities he led an expedition of USC undergraduates to Trans-Baikal, Siberia, to record music of the “Semeiskie” Old Believers; and he organized USC’s Russian Satirical Journals Project that digitized the university’s large collection of periodicals from the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905. He is presently taking part in a collaborative effort with several Russian scholars to create a critical edition of the works of Alexander Sumarokov, a major but largely forgotten eighteenth-century Russian literary luminary. He has been working on Sumarokov’s large-scale works for the court, including the first ballet and opera librettos in Russian. He has taught and lectured around the country, in Russia and in Europe.