Boris (Rodin) Maslov

Academic interests
Boris Maslov’s principal research interests are in Ancient Greek literature, literary theory, historical semantics, and comparative metrics. His current projects include a book on myth and plot (mostly) in Attic tragedy, articles on aesthetic republicanism, and a comparative statistical analysis of prosodic features of Ancient Greek verse and prose.
Courses taught at the UiO
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Cicero
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Greek epic
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Paleography and textual criticism (MA-level course)
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Latin lyric poetry
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Archaic Greek Lyric (MA-level class)
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Ancient Literature in Translation (lecture course)
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Greek Historians
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Hellenistic Poetry (MA-level class)
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Greek Drama
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Philology as a Way of Life (with R. Rubini)
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Advanced Greek Prose Composition
Background
- Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley (2009)
- B.A. Classical Languages, University of California, Berkeley (2003)
- B.A. Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley (2003)
- Boris Maslov is one of the founding members of the Historical Poetics Working Group. More information available on the HPWG website: https://sites.google.com/view/historicalpoetics.
- Since 2016, Professor Maslov has been a Senior Research Fellow in a project on “Reconstructive Poetics” at the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg.
Publications
Books
- Pindar and the Emergence of Literature. Сambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, co-edited with Ilya Kliger. New York: Fordham University Press (Series “Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics”), 2016.
- Poniatiia, idei, konstruktsii: ocherki sravnitel’noi istoricheskoi semantiki [Concepts, ideas, constructions: essays in comparative historical semantics], co-edited with Yury Kagarlitskiy and Dmitri Kalugin. Moscow: NLO, 2019.
Selected articles and book chapters
- “Republican Liberty and the Pindaric Genealogy of Modern Abstractions.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 14.1 (2019): 42-65.
- with Tatiana Nikitina. “Rhyme in European Verse: A Case for Quantitative Historical Poetics.” Comparative Literature 71.2 (2019): 194-212.
- “Konstruktsii dostoinstva: russkoe slovo i poniatie v sravnitel’noi perspektive.” [Constructions of dostoinstvo: the Russian word and concept in a comparative perspective.] In: Zhit’ s dostoinstvom, ed. O. V. Kharkhordin, 14-41. St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2019.
- “Lyric Universality,” Cambridge Companion to World Literature, ed. by B. Etherington and J. Zimbler. P. 133–148. Cambridge: CUP, 2018.
- “Zrelishche nachal i kontsov: tragediia v teoreticheskoi optike O. M. Freidenberg” [Gazing at the beginnings and the ends: tragedy in the theoretical optics of O. M. Freidenberg], Arbor Mundi/Mirovoe drevo: International Journal of Theory and History of World Culture 24 (2018) = Vestnik RGGU 36: 98-137.
- “How to Murder a Work of Art: Philology, Historical Poetics, and the Morphological Method.” Poetics Today 38: 3 (2017): 485-518 (special issue “Historical Poetics in Theory”).
- “The Children of Mnemosyne: a contrastive metapoetics of Pindar and Bacchylides.” Philologia Classica 11.2 (2016) 223-243.
- “The Genealogy of the Muses: an internal reconstruction of Archaic Greek metapoetics.” American Journal of Philology 137.3 (2016): 411-47.
- “Metapragmatics, Toposforschung, Marxist Stylistics: Three Extensions of Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics.” In Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, ed. I. Kliger and B. Maslov, 128-162. New York: Fordham UP, 2016.
- with Ilya Kliger, “Introducing Historical Poetics: History, Experience, Form.” In Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, ed. I. Kliger and B. Maslov, 1-36. New York: Fordham UP, 2016.
- with Tatiana Nikitina. “Verse structure and literary tradition: Correlating rhyme and stress in the Onegin stanza.” Style 49.4 (2015): 439-469.
- “Why Republics Always Fail: Pondering Feofan Prokopovich’s poetics of absolutism.” ВИВЛIОθИКА: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 2 (2014) 24-46.
- “The dialect basis of choral lyric and the history of poetic languages in Archaic Greece.” Symbolae Osloenses 87 (2013): 1-29.
- “Comparative Literature and Revolution, or the Many Arts of (Mis)Reading Alexander Veselovsky.” Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative Literature 2008 [2013] 2: 101-129.
- with Tatiana Nikitina. “Redefining constructio praegnans: on the variation between allative and locative expressions in Ancient Greek.” Journal of Greek Linguistics 13 (2013) 103-141.
- “Pindaric temporality, Goethe’s Augenblick, and the invariant plot of Tiutchev’s lyric” Comparative Literature 64.4 (2012) 356-381.
- “Oikeiōsis pros theon: Gregory of Nazianzus and the heteronomous subject of Eastern Christian penance.” Journal of Ancient Christianity/Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 16.2 (2012) 309-341.
- “The limits of Platonism: Gregory of Nazianzus and the invention of theōsis.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 52 (2012) 440-468.
- “The real life of the genre of prooimion.” Classical Philology 107.3 (2012) 191-205.
- “From (theogonic) mythos to (poetic) logos: reading Pindar’s genealogical metaphors after Freidenberg.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12.1 (2012) 49-77.
- “The metrical evidence for pre-Mycenaean hexameter epic reconsidered.” Indoevropeiskoe iazykoznanie i klassicheskaia filologiia XV (2011) 376-389.
- “The semantics of ἀοιδός and related compounds: Towards a historical poetics of solo performance in Archaic Greece.” Classical Antiquity 28.1 (2009) 1-38.
Translations and other
- Translations (into English) of A. N. Veselovsky, “From the Introduction to Historical Poetics” and “The Age of Sensibility”; O. M. Freidenberg, “Oresteia in the Odyssey”, M. L. Gasparov, “Columbus’ egg, or the structure of the novella.” In Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, 39-64, 165-171, 255-273.
- Translation (into English) of V. M. Zhivov, “Conceptual History, Cultural History, Social History.” ВИВЛIОθИКА: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 2 (2014) 1-15.
- Ed., with an introductory note, A. N. Veselovsky, “Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad,” translation by Jennifer Flaherty. PMLA 128.2 (2013) 439-451.
- Maslov, Boris (2020). “Gnyozda klochnei i rokovye retsidivy: k istoricheskoi poetike realisticheskikh siuzhetov”, I: Ilya Kliger; Aleksei Vdovin; Kirill Ospovat & Margarita Vaisman (red.), Russkii realism XIX veka: obshchestvo, znanie, povestvovanie [Russian 19th c. realism: society, knowledge, narration]. Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. ISBN 978-5-4448-1239-6. Chapter. s 522 - 558
- Maslov, Boris (2020). Review of The Joy of Recognition: Selected Essays of Omry Ronen, ed. by Barry P. Scherr and Michael Wachtel. Die Welt der Slaven: Internationale Halbjahresschrift für Slavistik. ISSN 0043-2520. 65(2), s 400- 407
- Maslov, Boris (2019). “ ‘Zhilishche tishiny preobratilos’ v ad’: o sud’be starorezhimnykh poniatii v Novoe vremia” (“‘The peaceful quiet’s abode transformed to hell’: on the modern fate of old régime concepts”), I: Dmitri Kalugin; Yuri Kagarlitskiy & Boris Maslov (red.), Понятия, идеи, конструкции : очерки сравнительной исторической семантики / Poni︠a︡tii︠a︡, idei, konstrukt︠s︡ii : ocherki sravnitelʹnoĭ istoricheskoĭ semantiki. (Concepts, ideas, constructions: studies in comparative historical semantics.). Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. ISBN 9785444811054. kapittel. s 324 - 373
- Maslov, Boris (2019). Republican liberty and the Pindaric genealogy of modern abstractions. Contributions to the History of Concepts. ISSN 1807-9326. 14(1), s 42- 65 . doi: 10.3167/choc.2019.140103
- Maslov, Boris & Nikitina, Tatiana (2019). Rhyme in European verse: A case for quantitative historical poetics. Comparative Literature. ISSN 0010-4124. 71(2), s 194- 212 . doi: 10.1215/00104124-7339149 Full text in Research Archive.
- Maslov, Boris (2018). Lyric Universality, In Ben Etherington & Jarad Zimbler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108613354. Chapter 8. s 133 - 148
- Maslov, Boris (2018). “Zrelishche nachal i kontsov: tragediia v teoreticheskoi optike O. M. Freidenberg” [Gazing at the beginnings and the ends: tragedy in the theoretical optics of O. M. Freidenberg]. Вестник РГГУ. ISSN 2073-6355. 36, s 98- 137 . doi: 10.28995/2073-6355-2018-3-98-137 Full text in Research Archive.
- Kalugin, Dmitri; Kagarlitskiy, Yuri & Maslov, Boris (red.) (2019). Понятия, идеи, конструкции : очерки сравнительной исторической семантики / Poni︠a︡tii︠a︡, idei, konstrukt︠s︡ii : ocherki sravnitelʹnoĭ istoricheskoĭ semantiki. (Concepts, ideas, constructions: studies in comparative historical semantics.). Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. ISBN 9785444811054. 443 s.
- Maslov, Boris & Nikitina, Tatiana (2019). “Comment let mots changent de sens”.
- Maslov, Boris (2019). “Archaic Truth.”.
- Maslov, Boris (2019). “Konstruktsii dostoinstva: russkoe slovo i poniatie v sravnitel’noi perspektive.” [Constructions of dostoinstvo: the Russian word and concept in a comparative perspective.], I: Zhit' s dostoinstvom. European University at St. Petersburg. ISBN 9785943802775. s 14 - 41
- Maslov, Boris & Kagarlitskiy, Yuri (2019). “Mezhdu Frege i Fuko: metodologicheskie orientiry istoricheskoi semantiki” (“Between Frege and Foucault: points of methodological orientation for historical semantics”), I: Dmitri Kalugin; Yuri Kagarlitskiy & Boris Maslov (red.), Понятия, идеи, конструкции : очерки сравнительной исторической семантики / Poni︠a︡tii︠a︡, idei, konstrukt︠s︡ii : ocherki sravnitelʹnoĭ istoricheskoĭ semantiki. (Concepts, ideas, constructions: studies in comparative historical semantics.). Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. ISBN 9785444811054. Innledning. s 9 - 38