Olga Maiorova is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855 1870 (2010) and has edited several books, including a two-volume edition of previously unpublished works by the major nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Leskov (1997 2000, in Russian) with Ksenia Bogaevskaya and Lia Rosenblium.