About

Igor Pilshchikov is a professor in the Department of Slavic, East European & Eurasian Languages & Cultures at UCLA. He holds a Doctor of Philology degree from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, obtained in 2008, with a specialization in general linguistics and literary theory. His academic background also includes a Candidate of Philology degree from Lomonosov Moscow State University, focusing on Russian and European literatures, earned in 1999, and postgraduate studies at the same institute. His educational journey began with a diploma with honors from the University of Tartu, where he studied Russian language and literature, as well as bibliography and library studies. Pilshchikov's research interests encompass poetics of 18th and 19th century Russian poetry, Russian-West-European cultural relations, comparative literature, Russian language, historical lexicography, translation theory, editorial theory, literary theory (including Russian Formalism and structuralism), cultural semiotics, and digital humanities. His scholarly contributions include numerous publications, such as books and articles, that explore themes like Russian literature, translation, language in literature, and poetic intertextuality. His work often examines prominent Russian poets such as Pushkin, Batiushkov, Baratynsky, and Gogol, as well as broader issues in Russian linguistic and literary history. Through his research, Pilshchikov has significantly contributed to the understanding of Russian literary poetics, linguistic history, and cultural relations, establishing himself as a notable figure in his field.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Philosophy
• Geometry
• History
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• East-European Formalism: Travels Across Space and Time. Editors’ Foreword

  Slavic Literatures · 2026-03-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontiers in Comparative Metrics V. In memory of Reuven Tsur and Barry Scherr. Call for Papers

  Studia Metrica et Poetica · 2025-10-25

  articleOpen access

  Frontiers in Comparative Metrics V. In memory of Reuven Tsur and Barry Scherr. Call for Papers

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• New Applications of Jakobson’s “Broad Metrics”: Sung Poetry and Dual-Metered Verse

  Studia Metrica et Poetica · 2025-10-25

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  meter and rhythmThis article extends Roman Jakobson’s framework of “broad metrics” to sung poetry. Building on his dichotomies of verse design/instance (poetic meter and rhythm) and delivery design/instance (recitation rules and performance), it proposes an additional dyad: musical design/instance (musical meter and rhythm), which often diverge from verse patterns. The study also incorporates Mihhail Lotman’s concept of secondary meter to account for dual metricity in verse. Analysis of sung texts with dual-metered verse structures – such as but not limited to hyperpaeonic syllabotonic meters – shows how verse and music coalesce to shape delivery rhythms that may oscillate between multiple meters. Whenever this occurs, the choice of a particular rhythmic variant is conditioned by the delivery design (performance strategy). The model is substantiated by case studies of three Soviet-era songs.

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• Неравноиктный акцентный стих Маяковского

  Slavic Literatures · 2025-08-11

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Over the last century, three distinct approaches to analyzing Mayakovsky’s prosodic innovations have emerged. The first contrasts Mayakovsky’s accentual verse with both syllabotonic meters that have a constant inter-ictic interval and dolnik -type meters that have limited variability in the syllabic length of the inter-ictic intervals. The second approach describes accentual verse in terms analogous to dolnik meters. Finally, the third approach seeks to reconcile the discrepancies between these two alternative perspectives by interpreting Mayakovsky’s accentual verse as a dual-metered structure, which is governed concurrently by the rules of both syllabotonic/ dolnik and accentual versification systems. In this article, we apply the latter approach to statistically analyze Mayakovsky’s non-isoictic accentual verse (a meter in which neither the amplitude of the variable inter-ictic interval nor the number of ictuses in each line is predetermined) and free binary meters (variable iambs and trochees) within the context of accentual verse.

  PublisherDOI

• Записная книжка Батюшкова <i>Разные замечания</i>: история заполнения

  Зборник Матице српске за славистику · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Antonina Martynenko’s dissertation: “Traditions and Innovations in Russian Poetry of the Second Half of the 1830s: A Quantitative Study”. Readers reports

  Studia Metrica et Poetica · 2025-10-25

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Antonina Martynenko’s dissertation: “Traditions and Innovations in Russian Poetry of the Second Half of the 1830s: A Quantitative Study”. Readers reports

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Marina Tarlinskaja at 90: A selected bibliography

  Studia Metrica et Poetica · 2025-12-31

  articleOpen access

  Marina Tarlinskaja at 90: A selected bibliography

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• Juri Lotman’s Analysis of the Poetic Text: Its Censorship History and an Unpublished Chapter on Marina Tsvetaeva

  Studia Metrica et Poetica · 2025-12-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Based on archival materials and Juri Lotman’s correspondence with publishers and colleagues, this article reconstructs the editorial history of his Analysis of the Poetic Text (1972) and examines how ideological constraints influenced the book’s final form. The selection of poems for analysis emerged as a central issue in the author’s negotiations with the Leningrad branch of the Prosveshchenie publishing house: editors and reviewers urged the inclusion of poets from the nineteenth-century Romantic and Realist canon and pressed for the reduction or removal of twentiethcentury Modernist authors, most notably Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak. These interventions affected not only the corpus of examples but also the logic of Lotman’s argument, which was oriented toward demonstrating the methods and scope of immanent analysis rather than offering representative coverage of all periods of Russian literary history. The article also introduces Lotman’s previously unpublished chapter on Tsvetaeva’s poem “Ty, menja ljubivshij fal’sh’ju...” (“You, who loved me with the falseness...”). Read in the context of Lotman’s theoretical vocabulary and his readings of other poets in Analysis of the Poetic Text, this chapter offers a particularly clear illustration of his structuralist method.

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• De la violencia al diálogo, o cómo viajan las metáforas desde la política a la poética, y de regreso

  Literatura teoría historia crítica · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  El artículo explora el legado y la evolución de la terminología marxista en la teoría literaria de Europa del Este, desde los formalistas rusos hasta la semiótica cultural de Yuri Lotman. Los teóricos rusos adoptaron metáforas clave del marxismo como “conflicto” y “violencia organizada”, reinterpretándolas para analizar la construcción del texto poético en lugar de la lucha de clases. Lotman heredó este vocabulario y lo aplicó a diversos textos artísticos y a la semiósfera en general, reinterpretando al mismo tiempo el concepto de dialogismo de Mijaíl Bajtín para analizar los conflictos sociales. Este proceso de transferencia y transformación conceptual (desde la política a la poética y de regreso) se debate aquí desde una perspectiva similar a las propuestas teóricas de Mieke Bal, quien destaca que los “conceptos viajeros” experimentan un proceso de negociación y revalorización en cada disciplina.

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• The Phoenix Half Reborn

  Canadian-American Slavic Studies · 2025-07-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Andrei Ustinov

  Princeton University

  12 shared

• Maria-Kristiina Lotman

  University of Tartu

  6 shared

• Marcus C. Levitt

  5 shared

• Joe Peschio

  5 shared

• Dennis Ioffe

  Université Libre de Bruxelles

  5 shared

• Владимир Николаевич Бойков

  4 shared

• Vera Polilova

  Moscow State University

  4 shared

• Anastasia Belousova

  Universidad Nacional de Colombia

  3 shared

Labs

• Igor PilshchikovPI

Education

• Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2006

• M.A., Slavic Languages and Literatures

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2002

• B.A., Slavic Languages and Literatures

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2000