September 23, 2002

Contact:

Sarah Ray

802-443-5794

sray@middlebury.edu

Posted: September 23, 2002

MIDDLEBURY, VT - Mikhail

N. Epstein, author of 15 books on Russian cultural theory and a new fictional

work “Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute

of Atheism,” will speak at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 1, on the Middlebury

College campus. Epstein’s talk, “The Varieties of Post-Atheist Experience:

Minimal Religion and Sectarian Consciousness in Late Soviet Russia,”

will include readings from his new book. The event will take place in

the conference room in the Robert A. Jones House on Hillcrest Road off

College Street (Route 125), and is free and open to the public.

Epstein is a leading figure

in Russian-American literary and cultural criticism. He is the author

of 15 books and hundreds of articles on Russian literature, religion and

philosophy. Born in Moscow in 1950, he immigrated to the United States

in 1990 and is presently the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural

Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University. His recent works include

“After the Future: Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian

Culture,” and “Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American

Models of Creative Communication,” co-written with Ellen Berry. Epstein

is the recipient of several prizes, including the Liberty Prize, which

is awarded to a prominent Russian cultural figure who has made an outstanding

contribution to American society.

Epstein’s new book, “Cries

in the New Wilderness,” has recently been published in English by

Paul Dry Books in a translation by Eve Adler, professor of classics at

Middlebury College. A unique “comedy of ideas,” it is based

on Epstein’s experience of the new religious movements that sprang up

in the latter days of the theoretically atheist Soviet regime. According

to Adler, it illuminates the spiritual condition of the Soviet Union and

also suggests unsuspected affinities between Russian and American culture.

In the mirror of Soviet society, Americans recognize their own enthusiasm

for alternative spiritual experience, their worship of technology, and

their own domestic doomsday cults.

The talk is cosponsored

by two College organizations-the Center for International Affairs and

Atwater Commons. For more information, contact Charlotte Tate at the Middlebury

College Center for International Affairs at tate@middlebury.edu

or 802-443-5795.