“Let me write a thesis on folklore to get away from folklore…”: An Interview with George Levinton

Abstract

We publish here an interview with George Levinton, a prominent specialist in philology, folklore and literary criticism, professor at the European University at St Petersburg, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Professor Levinton recalls his teachers and those who influenced his academic trajectory: his father Akhill Levinton, Vladimir Toporov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Boris Uspensky, Kirill Taranovsky. He talks about his academic career, atypical for a scholar in Soviet times, and about the institutions he worked in. He talks about the James Bond novels that helped him learn English and explains why he never worked ‘in the field’. Levinton’s interlocutors asked him to explain where the ‘wedding’ topic came from, and how he felt working with his co-authors (such as Albert Baiburin, Nikita Okhotin, Alexander Dolinin, Yury Kleiner, Viktor Lapin), and why he stopped teaching a course in poetics. They also tried to find out which of his numerous publications he considered the most important methodologically for science and for himself.