Mikhail Epstein Awarded MLA Scaglione Prize
Professor emeritus Mikhail Epstein was awarded the MLA Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures for his Ideas Against Ideocracy: Neo-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (Bloomsbury, 2022).
The committee's citation reads:
"Mikhail Epstein’s magisterial "Ideas against Ideocracy: Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991)" completes the project begun in its companion volume, the 2020 "Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period", tracing the development of Eurasianist, Christian, cosmist, and postmodern strands. Epstein clarifies and contextualizes the contributions of a dizzying range of thinkers, and his painstaking scholarship, lucid explication, and capacious archive make this an essential guide to the fertile and sometimes eccentric riot of ideas that emerged in the late Soviet period. Despite its omnivorous scope, however, his account is never merely encyclopedic. Epstein’s framing arguments about the saturation of Soviet life with the philosophical and about the Soviet consummation and exhaustion of the Platonic tradition will foster productive disputation for years to come."
See full award document here: