Professor Maxim Shrayer opens his Classic Russian Literature class by inquiring about his students' acquisition of the required texts, questions concerning the syllabus, and what he demands from them. After this is out of the way, class begins, and Shrayer's enjoyment of learning and love of literature shines through.
A professor at Boston College for 13 years, Shrayer is the head of the Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures department. "I am very lucky," Shrayer says, "because I am able to teach many different courses on varying subjects, all of which I enjoy." The courses he teaches, other than Classic Russian Literature, include Jewish Writers in Russia and America, a course on Nabokov, 20th century Russian Literature, Advanced Russian Grammar, and Exile and Literature, a course that Shrayer especially enjoys teaching.
Born in Moscow in 1969, Shrayer and his parents immigrated to the United States in 1897 after spending some time in Vienna, Austria, and a summer in Italy. He had already completed a few years of school and continued his education as a transfer student at Brown University, where he studied comparative literature and literary translation. Teaching, he says, is not something he pictured himself doing but rather something that was to be expected after attending graduate school.
"It is hard work, but extremely gratifying," he says. "Initially, I actually was more interested in becoming a doctor," he says with a laugh. He explains that teaching comes with the territory of writing and research and after grad school he discovered the relationship that exists between receiving a higher literary education and teaching.
In the classroom, Shrayer prefers to teach with the Socratic method in mind. "I much rather converse with my students than lecture them," he says. An accomplished and well-known writer, he says that becoming a writer was something he always assumed he would do. "I feel that each country has its own perception of what a writer is. In the U.S., it is someone who is expected to make a living off his or her work. You are trained to write, and that is to be a profession. In Russia, writing isn't expected to make a living. Rather, it is reserved for those who find it to be a calling."
Shrayer has written over 10 books; he began to seriously write poetry when he was 18, and his first book of poetry was published when he was 23. He began to write fiction when he was 20, and his first academic book came out when he was 30. His most recent book, Waiting for America, is about his own experience as an immigrant to the United States and how he was no longer truly an immigrant because of the time he had spent away from his own country before entering the United States.
Besides being head of the department for Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literature, Shrayer also holds a position in the English department. This reason for this, he explains, is that many of the literature classes, such as the Classic Russian Literature class, are of much interest to many English majors. Many of the literature classes, however, only offer classes of texts that were originally written in English, and many majors want to study texts that are of other cultures and traditions. Therefore, texts such as the Russian literature that Shrayer teaches must be translated. That's where professors such as Shrayer come in. They combine their knowledge of such works and teach it to students in English.
"Boston College is a little old-fashioned in that all literature classes are cross referenced with the English department due to a lack of a comparative literature program," Shrayer says.
Additionally, Shrayer helped to found the Jewish Studies Program, and continues to sit on its advisory board.
Besides being a full-time professor at BC and a successful writer, he is also husband to Dr. Karen Lasser and father to two little girls. His wife is a medical doctor who works at a Cambridge hospital. An American-born daughter of immigrants, she works in public health research including addictions. Their daughters, ages 2 and 11 months, are being brought up to be bilingual, with their mother speaking to them in English and their proud father speaking to them in Russian. With this said, Shrayer's love of the Russian language goes far beyond the classroom.
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