Boris (Rodin) Maslov

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

“An Incorporate Fellowship? Antiphon, Thucydides, Beccaria, and Elizabeth Petrovna on the Death Penalty.” Critical Inquiry, Spring 2026, 539-560.

“Rhythmical figures in Pindar.” Eranos 115 (2024-2025): 7-28.

“Feeding upon the double-headed eagle: A Zhivovian reading of Kheraskov's Rossiad.” Slavic Review 83.2, Summer 2024, 281-299.

With Tatiana Nikitina. “Remembering the Odyssey in the 21st century: spontaneous oral narratives by non-professional readers.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 52.2 (2024) 169-203.

“Aristotle and Freidenberg on Tragic Character,” in Mif. Ritual. Literatura (Festschrift v chest’ professora N. V. Braginskoi). Moscow: Izd. dom VShE, 2023, 300-313.

with Paulo do Nascimento Brito, “Aesthetic Republicanism in Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony.” Russian Review 82 (2023) 232-247.

“The Tragic Iambic Trimeter as a Prosodic Milieu.” Symbolae Osloenses 96.1 (2022) 45-71.

“Transistoricheskoe soobshchestvo kak predmet filologicheskogo znaniia.” (Transhistorical community as object of philological knowledge.) Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 174.2 (2022) 43-55.

with Tatiana Nikitina. “Rhymed talk and ideophones: Recovering extinct discourse practices from Russian Realist fiction.” Signs and Society 10.2 (2022): 169-190.

“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.

“Lyric Universality,” Cambridge Companion to World Literature, ed. by B. Etherington and J. Zimbler. P. 133–148. Cambridge: CUP, 2018.

“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 Genealogy of the Muses: an internal reconstruction of Archaic Greek metapoetics.” American Journal of Philology 137.3 (2016): 411-47.

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.

“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.

“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.

Translations

• Introductory note and translation: Sergei Averintsev, “Toward an Interpretation of the Symbolism of the Oedipus Myth (1972),” in Arion 29.2 (2021): 99-123.
• 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 (2026). An Incorporate Fellowship? Antiphon, Thucydides, Beccaria, and Elizabeth Petrovna on the Death Penalty. Critical Inquiry. ISSN 0093-1896. 52(3), p. 539–560. doi: 10.1086/739751. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2025). When Ethics and Poetics Were One: Weltanschauung in nineteenth-century Classical philology. In Macintosh, Fiona & Ricks, David (Ed.), Poetry and Poetics, Greek and Beyond: Essays in Honour of M. S. Silk. Routledge. ISSN 9781032585086. p. 43–56. doi: 10.4324/9781003450436-5. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2025). Rhythmical figures in Pindar. Eranos. ISSN 0013-9947. 115, p. 7–28. doi: https:/journals.uu.se/Eranos/article/view/607/649. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The article puts forward a new functionalist approach to Pindaric meter, inspired by Snell’s dynamic analysis of lyric cola and research on rhythm in modern European syllabo-accentual poetry. Pindar is shown to employ cola-like syllable series, termed rhythmical figures (for example, long sequences of light syllables), as local prosodic events within individual poems that belong (mostly) to the non-dactylo-epitritic (“Aeolic”) subcorpus of the epinikia. These rhythmical figures are often buttressed by word boundaries, especially toward the beginning of the poem, making them more easily perceptible. Pindar’s use of this device reveals an added level of complexity in metrical responsion, which extends beyond rhythm and lexical recurrence to prosodic phrases marked by word boundaries.

• Maslov, Boris (2024). Poem/Song. In Pryor, Sean (Eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Poem. Cambridge University Press. ISSN 9781009498906. p. 49–66. doi: 10.1017/9781009498852.005. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter explores the link between poem and song by examining the relationship between texts of poems, their metrical properties, their performance modes, and their musical settings. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of choral support as an element of lyric and Michael Silverstein's analysis of metricalization in ritual serve as the main theoretical reference points. The chapter draws a distinction between, on the one hand, varieties of lyric that retain a historical link to song (such as Ancient Greek stanzaic forms of melos or the East Slavic chastushka) and, on the other, poems that evoke a potential sung performance, often as an invitation to set these poems to music (e.g., Schiller's “An die Freude”). The chapter then considers the political significance of collectively sung lyric with reference to the modern European revolutionary tradition, concluding with an examination of Fyodor Chaliapin's spontaneous performance of “Dubinushka” in Kiev in 1905. The formal properties of this working-class song, whose authors and origin are obscure but whose refrain was familiar to most audience members, contributed to a scene of secular social effervescence.

• Nikitina, Tatiana & Maslov, Boris (2024). Remembering the Odyssey in the 21st century: spontaneous oral narratives by non-professional readers. Journal of Narrative Theory (JNT). ISSN 1549-0815. 54(2), p. 169–203. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2024). Feeding Upon the Double-Headed Eagle: A Zhivovian Reading of Kheraskov's Rossiad. Slavic Review: Interdisciplinary Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. ISSN 0037-6779. 83(2), p. 281–299. doi: 10.1017/slr.2024.375. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2023). Aristotle and Freidenberg on tragic character. In Ivanova, Iu. V. (Eds.), Mif, ritual, literatura: Festschrift v chest' professora N. V. Braginskoi. Higher School of Economics. ISSN 9785759825531. p. 300–313. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris & Brito, Paulo (2023). Aesthetic Republicanism in Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony. Russian Review. ISSN 0036-0341. 82, p. 232–247. doi: 10.1111/russ.12438. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris & Kalugin, Dmitri (2023). On the concept of humanity [O poniatii chelovechnosti]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. ISSN 0869-6365. 184(6), p. 301–315. doi: 10.53953/08696365_2023_184_6_301. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2023). The tragic iambic trimeter as a prosodic milieu. Symbolae Osloenses - Norwegian Journal of Greek and Latin Studies. ISSN 0039-7679. 96(1), p. 45–71. doi: 10.1080/00397679.2023.2179807. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris & Nikitina, Tatiana (2022). Rhymed Talk and Ideophones: Recovering Extinct Discourse Practices from Russian Realist Fiction. Signs and Society. ISSN 2326-4489. 10(2), p. 169–190. doi: 10.1086/718860. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article presents a case for approaching works of nineteenth-century realist fiction as proto-ethnographic documents that contain unique evidence for reconstructing extinct discourse practices. We focus on two previously undescribed phenomena: improvised rhyming in sparring dialogue, and the use of ideophones in oral storytelling.

• Maslov, Boris (2022). The Transhistorical Community as Object of Philological Knowledge. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. ISSN 0869-6365. 174(2), p. 43–55. doi: 10.53953/08696365_2022_174_2_43. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2022). “Taking the side of the father, our epic blackened the son”: two notes on the historical poetics of recognition” “‘Stav na storone ottsa, nash epos ochernil syna’: dve zametki ob istoricheskoi poetike uznavaniia. In Dovgii, Olga (Eds.), "V otvet na luchshie dary": Venok k 63-mu dniu rozhdeniia Aleksandra Evgen'evicha Makhova "В ответ на лучшие дары": Венок к 63-му дню рождения Александра Евгеньевича Махова. Intrada. ISSN 9785604863541. p. 244–256. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2022). De stupore Vergiliano adnotationes. In Lamers, Han & Bär, Silvio Friedrich (Ed.), Studia in honorem Vibeke Roggen. Hermes Academic Publishing and Bookshop A/S. ISSN 9788280342126. p. 91–97. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This book pays homage to Vibeke Roggen, Associate Professor of Latin at the University of Oslo, who has been a driving force and guiding spirit of classical culture in Norway. On the occasion of her retirement in 2022, national and international colleagues as well as former students joined forces to acknowledge her commitment to Classics by contributing to this Festschrift. It is dedicated to Vibeke Roggen in gratitude and admiration for the inexhaustible energy, enthusiasm and generosity with which she has promoted the study of Latin and classical culture over the last few decades. Divided in four main thematic sections ("Verba et voces", "Studia Neolatina", "Miscellanea litteraria et historica", and "Paedogogica"), the book contains contributions in Norwegian, Danish, English, German, Latin, and Spanish. Contributors include Tor Egil Førland, Mari Brenna Volland, Siri Sande, Silvio Bär, Anastasia Maravela, Giuliano Sidro, Monika Asztalos, Boris Maslov, Milena Minkova, Han Lamers, Egil Kraggerud, Pieta van Beek, Andreas Fritsch, William M. Barton, Minna Skafte Jensen, Sigrid Albert, Synnøve des Bouvrie, Marek Thue Kretschmar, Paola Marongiu, Christian Laes, Dirk Sacré, Eirik Welo, Tuomo Pekkanen, Giancarlo Rossi, Sofia Heim, Pål Rykkja Gilbert, J. Rasmus Brandt, Tor Ivar Østmoe, Victoria Mostue, Halfdan Baadsvik, Mathilde Skoie, Hilde Sejersted, Tilman Hartenstein, Toon Van Hal, Jan Papy, Federico Aurora, Iris Brecke, and Thea S. Thorsen.

• Maslov, Boris (2021). Introductory note and translation: Sergei Averintsev, “Toward an Interpretation of the Symbolism of the Oedipus Myth (1972),” in Arion 29.2 (2021): 99-123. Introductory note on pp. 99-102. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. ISSN 0095-5809. 29(2), p. 99–102. Full text in Research Archive
• 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), p. 400–407. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2020). “Gnyozda klochnei i rokovye retsidivy: k istoricheskoi poetike realisticheskikh siuzhetov”. In Kliger, Ilya; Vdovin, Aleksei; Ospovat, Kirill & Vaisman, Margarita (Ed.), Russkii realism XIX veka: obshchestvo, znanie, povestvovanie [Russian 19th c. realism: society, knowledge, narration]. Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. ISSN 9785444812396. p. 522–558. Full text in Research Archive
• 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”). In Kalugin, Dmitri; Kagarlitskiy, Yuri & Maslov, Boris (Ed.), 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. ISSN 9785444811054. p. 324–373. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2019). Republican liberty and the Pindaric genealogy of modern abstractions. Contributions to the History of Concepts. ISSN 1807-9326. 14(1), p. 42–65. doi: 10.3167/choc.2019.140103. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris & Nikitina, Tatiana (2019). Rhyme in European verse: A case for quantitative historical poetics. Comparative Literature. ISSN 0010-4124. 71(2), p. 194–212. doi: 10.1215/00104124-7339149. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Building on statistical approaches to poetic meter, this article puts forward a new quantitative method for exploring syllabo-accentual verse that takes into account several formal properties, including rhythm, rhyming, and stanzaic architecture. Against the background of a broad typology of European verse, it argues that a basic compensatory mechanism balancing different levels of organization of verse is complicated by the interaction between different national traditions. As a particularly complex case the article investigates the introduction of syllabo-accentual verse in Russia in the 1730s–40s, which represented an encounter between Polish, German, and French practices of versification. In addition to the general compensatory principle and local effects of borrowing, the article discusses a previously unexplored kind of formal complexity that evolves with the maturation of a tradition of verse making: certain nontrivial correlations between rhythm and rhyme that have been observed in Pushkin are not found in the work of Lomonosov, a poet who stands at the origin of Russian syllabo-accentual verse. The article’s conclusion addresses the relevance of the quantitative approach to the larger theoretical claims of Historical Poetics.

• 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, p. 98–137. doi: 10.28995/2073-6355-2018-3-98-137. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The article elaborates some of the key insights drawn from olga Freidenberg’s analysis of Attic tragedy in Image and Concept, focussing on the implications of her notion of primitive spectactorship for research into other forms of literature. Freidenberg’s categories are put into dialogue with those of Walter Benjamin and György Lukács and, in the concluding section, employed in a contrastive analysis of Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and Valentin Kataev’s time, Forward!, works that display opposite attitudes to the descriptive (and scopophilic) impulse in European realism.

• Maslov, Boris (2018). Lyric Universality. In Etherington, Ben & Zimbler, Jarad (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISSN 9781108613354. p. 133–148. Full text in Research Archive

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• Kalugin, Dmitri; Kagarlitskiy, Yuri & Maslov, Boris (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 p. Full text in Research Archive

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• Maslov, Boris (2025). The Muses. In Guez, J.-Ph.; Klein, F.; Peigney, J. & Prioux, É. (Ed.), Dictionnaire des images du poétique dans l’Antiquité. Classiques Garnier. p. 1065–1076. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2022). Review of T. Hodge, Hunting Nature: Ivan Turgenev and the Organic World (Ithaca, 2020) Russian Review 81.1 (2022): 147-148. Russian Review. ISSN 0036-0341. 81(1), p. 147–148. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris (2022). Review of A. Uhlig, Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Journal of Hellenic Studies. ISSN 0075-4269. 142, p. 343–344. Full text in Research Archive
• 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.], Zhit' s dostoinstvom. European University at St. Petersburg. ISSN 9785943802775. p. 14–41. Full text in Research Archive
• Maslov, Boris & Kagarlitskiy, Yuri (2019). “Mezhdu Frege i Fuko: metodologicheskie orientiry istoricheskoi semantiki” (“Between Frege and Foucault: points of methodological orientation for historical semantics”). In Kalugin, Dmitri; Kagarlitskiy, Yuri & Maslov, Boris (Ed.), 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. ISSN 9785444811054. p. 9–38. Full text in Research Archive

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