Keynote Speaker
Literary Modernism: Perspectives from East and West
(Marking the 135th Anniversary of the Birth of Osip Mandelstam)
International Symposium
Keynote Speaker
Professor Pavel Polian (also known as Pavel Nerler)
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| "Pavel Polian (Nerler)" by Svklimkin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons |
Pavel Polian (1952- ) is a Russian geographer, historian, philologist, literary scholar, poet, and writer. His research focuses on forced migrations, forced labor and the prisoners of war during the WWII, Jewish emigration, and the Holocaust. In his literary work, he publishes under the pen name Pavel Nerler and is a member of the Free Literary Society and the Moscow Writers' Union.
He has edited collections of works by Osip Mandelstam, his wife Nadezhda Mandelstam, and many other poets. He has also written numerous books and articles on them as well as on broader cultural and linguistic topics. Polian is widely known as the co-organizer of the Mandelstam Society at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University), where he serves as chairman to the present.
Pavel Polian in Humanities and Social Science Research
He graduated from the Department of Geography at Moscow State University, where he specialized in economic geography. He later earned his Ph.D. and joined the faculty of the same department in 2008.
Professor Polian has held long-term positions at the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Stavropol State University (now the North Caucasus Federal University), and the University of Freiburg in Germany. He publishes articles under his real name in the fields of geography, demography, and history.
He has authored hundreds of scholarly and popular science articles and edited volumes in related disciplines. His major works include: Methodology of Allocation and Analysis of the Settlement Support Frame (1988); Victims of Two Dictatorships: Life, Work, Humiliation and Death Advice. Prisoners of War and Ostarbeiters in Foreign Lands and in Their Homeland (1996; 2002; translated into German and Japanese); Deported Home: Soviet Prisoners of War in the “Third Reich” and Their Repatriation (2001, published in German); Against Their Will... The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (2001; translated into English and Polish); Stalin's Deportations. 1928-1953 (2005, co-authored with N. Pobol); Scrolls in the Ashes: The Jewish Task Force and Its Chronologists at Auschwitz-Birkenau (2013; 2015; 2018; translated into German and Czech); Historimore, or Memory Trepanation. Battles for the Truth about the Gulag, Deportations, War and the Holocaust (2016); Geographical Arabesques: Spaces of Inspiration, Freedom, and Unfreedom (2017), among other works.
Pavel Nerler in Creative Writing, Philology and Literary Studies, specializing in Mandelstam
Under the pen name Pavel Nerler, he writes poetry and conducts literary research. He is a disciple of, and friend to Arkady A. Steinberg, Semyon Lipkin, Arseny Tarkovsky, and Vladimir Mikushevich. He has published two poetry collections, Botanical Garden (1998) and Leap Year Circles (2013), and has translated works by Rilke (Lyrical Poems), Celan, Shakespeare, Titsian Tabidze, among others.
He has also published extensively on a wide range of cultural and linguistic issues. As a literary scholar, Nerler played an active role in collecting and publishing scattered works, letters, and documents of the renowned Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. In addition, he contributed to the publication of works by other poets who, like Mandelstam, were imprisoned or persecuted in the Soviet Union, such as Benedikt Livshits and Aleksandr Tsybulevsky. He further edited Mandelstam’s complete works and led the Mandelstam Encyclopedia project.
His major literary studies include: Osip Mandelstam's Word and “Case”: A Book of Denunciations, Interrogations, and Indictments (2010); Osip Mandelstam and America (2012); Con Amor: Sketches of Mandelstam (2014); Osip Mandelstam and His Camp Fellow Prisoners (2015); Osip Mandelstam's Last Years: Condemnation, Exile, and Death of a Poet (2017), among other works.
The works of Mandelstam that Nerler edited include: O. Mandelstam, Collected Works, in 4 Volumes (1999); The Mandelstam Encyclopedia, In 2 Volumes (2017); Great Prose: The Noise of Time, Feodosia, The Egyptian Stamp, The Fourth Prose, A Journey to Armenia (2021).
Since 2015, Polian has worked at the HSE University in Moscow. He serves as the leading expert at the Center for Digital Archival Studies, applying computational methods to historical texts and extending this approach to literary archives.