Galina Rylkova

Professor of Russian
Ph.D., University of Toronto, Canada

Areas of Interest

Narrative Medicine and Medical humanities; Psychology of Creative Personality; Russian and European Modernism; Anton Chekhov; contemporary Russian literature; cultural studies; Russian cinema; Psychology of Creative Personality.

Biography

Galina Rylkova is Professor of Russian Studies. She was born in Moscow, Russia, and received her M.A. in Romance-Germanic languages and literatures from Moscow State University. She then moved to Canada where she received her Ph. D. from the University of Toronto in Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is the author of more than 20 published research articles, numerous book reviews, and The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and Its Legacy, monograph, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2007, 270 pages: http://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=35892Links to an external site.

The Archaeology of Anxiety describes how Russian writers, Russian intellectuals and the public at large were coping with the existential anxieties unleashed by the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinist Terror, Khrushchev’s Thaw and Gorbachev’s perestroika in 20th-century Russia. The Archaeology of Anxiety was reviewed in The Russian Review; SEEJ; The Slavic Review; Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History; H-Net Reviews; American Historical Review; Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie; Canadian Slavonic Papers; Europe Asia Studies; Slavonic and East European Review; Revue des etudes slaves.

Rylkova’s second book, Breaking Free from Death: The Art of Being a Successful Russian Writer, examines how Russian writers respond to the burden of living with anxieties about their creative outputs, and, ultimately, about their own inevitable finitude. What contributes to creative death are not just crippling diseases that make man defenseless in the face of death, and not just the arguably universal fear of death but, equally important, the innumerable impositions on the part of various outsiders. Many conflicts in the lives of Rylkova’s subjects arose not from their opposition to the existing political regimes but from their interactions with like-minded and supporting intellectuals, friends, and relatives. The book describes the lives and choices that concrete individuals and—by extrapolation—their literary characters must face in order to preserve their singularity and integrity while attempting to achieve fame, greatness, and success. Breaking Free from Death was reviewed in The Slavic Review; The Russian Review; and Slavonic and East European Review.
https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9781644692660/Links to an external site.

For Rylkova’s talk about her book go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUxhWwCNs_Q

Rylkova’s current research interests include: Psychology of Creative Personality; Narrative Medicine; Chekhov; Nabokov; Cultural Memory; Biography; and World Theater.

Courses Taught Recently

• RUT3442: Literature as a Healing Art.
• LIT2000: Introduction to Literature (both in-class and online versions). I have created my own online version of this course in 2022.
• RUT3101: Russian Masterpieces.
• RUT3441: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
• RUW4370: Russian Short Prose
• RUW4301: Russian Drama and Poetry
• RUS4411: Advanced Oral Practice
• RUS1130: Introductory Russian I
• RUS3400: Intermediate Russian II

Publications