Fabrizio Fenghi (Slavic Languages & Literatures) was drawn to Russian literature in college because he loved the novels of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. He spent a lot of time in Russia and became increasingly interested in Soviet and post-Soviet art, literature, and film.
His undergraduate thesis at the University of Milan was on the postmodernist Russian writer Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990), and his master’s thesis focused on the aesthetics of violence in post-Soviet Russia. He was in Moscow when political demonstrations erupted in 2011, which influenced his choice of a dissertation topic.
