After graduating from Harvard College in 1981, Wachtel pursued a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. While still a Ph.D. student, he was appointed a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University, where he taught between 1988 and 1991. In 1991, he was appointed Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. He remained at Northwestern for 19 years, serving at various times as Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Director of the Program in Comparative Literature, Director of the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies and Dean of the Graduate School.
Scholarly interests
Wachtel’s scholarship ranges over a broad array of languages, cultures and disciplines, with a primary focus on the feedback loops between longue durée cultural and historical processes. His first book, The Battle for Childhood. Creation of a Russian Myth examined the ways in which the Russian understanding of childhood grew out of a series of founding literary texts. In An Obsession with History. Russian Writers Confront the Past he considered the inter-generic dialogue between fictional and historical texts in writers from Karamzin to Solzhenitsyn. Switching his focus to Yugoslavia, Wachtel next published Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, which focused on the various ways in which the concept of Yugoslavia was developed over almost 100 years. That book was published subsequently in Serbian, Slovenian and Romanian translation. In 2006, Wachtel released a large-scale study in literary sociology entitled Remaining Relevant After Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. . Based on survey data and literary analysis from across Eastern Europe and the former USSR, the book traces literature’s loss of prestige in the post-communist world and the strategies of writers to retain their importance to society. It has appeared in Serbian, Bulgarian and Czech editions as well. In 2008, Wachtel published The Balkans in World History, a short history for general readers that has also appeared in Turkish, Albanian and Italian. Wachtel has a parallel interest in Russian theatre and drama and has written a number of books and articles in this area including Petrushka: Sources and Contexts and Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian 20th-Century Drama. He also co-wrote a cultural history if Russian literature with Ilya Vinitsky. Wachtel has worked as a translator from multiple Slavic languages for many years. Among his book length translations are Drago Jančar, The Prophecy and Other Stories. He has published three book-length collections of the poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya, including Paul Klee’s Boat which was short-listed for the PEN Poetry Translation Award, 2014. Together with Ilya Kutik he created the first major web anthology of Russian poetry From the Ends to the Beginning. Between 1994 and 2010 he served as editor of the acclaimed “Writings from an Unbound Europe” series at Northwestern University Press which published more than 50 titles from all over Eastern and Central Europe.
Family
Wachtel has 2 sons and 2 daughters. Parents: Dr. Fred Wachtel, cardiologist and Miriam Rados. Wachtel grew up with two brothers — Michael Wachtel Professor of Russian Literature, Princeton University and David Wachtel Senior Vice President, Marketing, Communications and Partnerships, :ru:Endeavor_Global|Endeavor Global. Wachtel’s ancestors originated from Eastern Europe. Father’s parents: George Wachtel born around 1900 in Galicia, Poland, Russian empire; Bella Beck born circa 1905 in Poland, Russian empire. Mother’s mother Berta Zalmenovna Drapkina born in Rostov-on-Don, Russian empire 1896, mother’s father Andrew Rados born in Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire circa 1885.
