Steiner, Evgeny 1955–

(Anton Evenbach, Antony Iwajin, E. Saskin)

PERSONAL:

Born April 14, 1955, in Moscow, U.S.S.R. (now Russia); immigrated to the United States, 1995; naturalized U.S. citizen; son of Semion and Valentina Steiner; children: Arseny, Gabriel. Ethnicity: "Jewish-Russian." Education: Moscow State University, M.A. 1981; Institute for Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Ph.D., 1984; Hebrew University of Jerusalem, postdoctoral studies, 1991-92.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY; and Manchester, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, U.S.S.R. (now Russia), assistant archivist, 1975-80; Iskusstvo (publishing house), Moscow, editor, 1981-83, senior editor, 1983-90; Moscow State University, Moscow, adjunct lecturer in philosophy, 1988-89; Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel, lecturer in art history, 1991-94; Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, guest scholar, 1994-95; Shinjuan Temple, Daitokuji Zen Monastery, Kyoto, Japan, acolyte, 1996; Meiji Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan, visiting researcher, 1996-97; New York University, adjunct faculty in history of art, 1998—. Russian State University for Humanities, visiting professor, 1994; State University of New York, visiting associate professor, 2002-05; University of Manchester, visiting Leverhulme professor, 2006-07; Russian Institute for Cultural Research, principal researcher, 2006—. Yeshiva University, archivist at university museum, 1999-2000; also public speaker and preparer of exhibits for universities, museums, and galleries around the world; consultant to American Jewish Historical Society.

MEMBER:

International Association of Word and Image Studies, Association for Asian Studies, College Art Association, Russian Union of Artists and Art Critics, Society for Japanese Art.

WRITINGS:

Ikkyu Sojun: Tvorcheskaya Lichnost' v Kontekste Srednevekovoi Kultury (in Russian with an English summary; title means "Ikkyu Sojun: A Creative Personality in the Context of Medieval Culture"), Nauka (Moscow, U.S.S.R.), 1987.

Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists in the Early Soviet Children's Books, University of Washington Press (Seattle, WA), 1999.

English-Japanese Children's Dictionary, Hippocrene (New York, NY), 2000.

Japanese/English and English/Japanese Dictionary and Phrasebook, Hippocrene (New York, NY), 2000.

Letters from Space (novel), Zerkalo (Tel-Aviv, Israel), 2000, enlarged edition (in Russian), New Literary Review (Moscow, Russia), 2006.

Avangard i postroenie novogo cheloveka: Iskusstvo sovetskoi detskoi knigi 1920 godov (title means "The Avant-Garde and the Construction of the New Man"), Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (Moscow, Russia), 2002.

Bez Fudziyamy (essays; title means "Without Mount Fuji"; in Russian with English summary), Natalis Publishers (Moscow, Russia), 2005.

Dzen-Zhizn: Ikkyu i Okrestnosti (title means "Zen Life: Ikkyu and Beyond"; in Russian with English summary), Orientalia (St. Petersburg, Russia), 2006.

(Translator and contributor of introduction and commentary) Victory over the Sun (originally written in Russian), Artists Bookworks (London, England), 2007.

Author of scripts for animated films. Contributor of more than 200 articles, essays, and short stories to periodicals. Some writings reportedly appear under pseudonyms Anton Evenbach, Antony Iwajin, and E. Saskin.

Steiner's works have also been published in Hebrew and Japanese.

SIDELIGHTS:

Evgeny Steiner once told CA: "I did not consider myself a writer for the most part of my writing career. Perhaps I was just afraid of composing fiction. Before I could permit myself any creative writing, I wanted to understand the ethical/aesthetical position of a creative person in a rigidly structured and strictly regulated non-democratic society. I was interested in problems of artistic expression, performance and art actions or, in other words, in possibilities of writing the total artistic text of life. Also, in the situation of the alienation from the Soviet totalitarian society, where I happened to exist before 1990, I sought for models of creative interaction of like-minded persons. Curiously enough, I found both in the Zen-inspired complex of the arts and letters of medieval Japan. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation about renga (‘linked verse’), the Japanese poetic genre in which poems are composed in the act of ritual sitting of a circle of participants united by the atmosphere of the ‘one heart’. Among the very few creative people in the West who have been attracted by creative opportunity of renga were Octavio Paz and John Cage.

"The first book I published was a psychological and ‘culturological’ analysis of an untrammeled person in a very trammeling social situation. The hero, Ikkyu, was a distinguished poet, artist, calligrapher, Zen monk, and charismatic leader in fifteenth-century Japan. The book combined a belletristic style of writing with scholarly analysis. I remember one reader who came to visit me from Siberia telling me that upon reading this book he abandoned his ordinary life and deserted to the wilderness, book in hand, to become a free poet and beekeeper.

"My next book, Stories for Little Comrades: Revolutionary Artists in the Early Soviet Children's Books, came to life rather unexpectedly. It began in the mid-eighties as bedside reading for my son and continued as a contemplation of the essence of avant-garde art of the early twentieth century. On this very fascinating material of visual and poetic avant-garde art, I scrutinized my perennial problem: the role of the artist in his world, and the impact of innovative revolutionary writers and artists on their audience. The aspects studied in this book are as follows: the message of avant-garde; the mentality of avant-garde artists; their impact on the masses (concretely, on children); the communal vs. the individual spirit of avant-garde; relationships with totalitarian authorities.

"Continuing the children's theme, I compiled English-Japanese Children's Dictionary, and on another assignment from the same publisher, Hippocrene, I extended my English-Japanese linguistic writings to adult readership. This work brought me some money and not much satisfaction.

"After translating half a dozen of books on art and artists (Russia and Israel), and editing about twenty books on art and culture (Russia, Israel, the United States); after writing about two hundred articles, essays, and exhibition catalogs (Russia, Israel, Japan, the United States), in later years I finally began to publish my own prose fiction. In a novella titled ‘Gonsuke from Shinjuku,’ I described the world of a man who lost everything and lives nowhere. After my highly wrought and contextually dense culturological writings, I tried to write ‘simple.’

At the end of 2000 the Russian-Israeli publisher Zerkalo published an abridged version of my epistolary novel Letters from Space—a selection of diaries/letters written on the road between Moscow, Jerusalem, Amsterdam, Budapest, Tokyo, New York, Ottawa, Kyoto etc., mostly on planes. They fixate the protagonist's personal experience of a postmodern nomad perambulating the globe in search of his Ithaca (while knowing that it no longer exists), and running for his Penelope (denying the evidence that she betrayed). It was later enlarged and published in Moscow in Russian.

"After spending a year at the International Cemetery in Yokohama as a spiritual undertaker (that's how I call my academic research project), I began to work on a novel based on my diggings titled And All of Them Died There. It is a kind of Borgesian pseudo-historical description of the dim world of displaced persons—Russian expatriates and stateless in Japan—who lived, loved, lied and begot children in situations ill-suited for life."

Steiner later added: "This novel has fallen into a dormant state, although I included some chapters from it in my collection of essays loosely united by the subject of Japan, Bez Fudziyamy.

"In continuation of my avant-garde studies, I translated and wrote commentaries and an introductory essay for the seminal text of Russian futurism, Victory over the Sun."