Of Politics and Pandemics

Writing in the vibrant voice of “A Russian Immigrant” and employing a rich variety of poetic forms, award-winning author and Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer offers thirty-six interconnected poems about the impact of election-year politics and COVID-19 on American society. Through a combination of biting satire and piercing lyricism, Of Politics and Pandemics delivers a translingual poetic manifesto of despair, hope, love, and loss.


Maxim D. Shrayer, a translingual author, scholar and translator, is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College and Director of the Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry at Harvard’s Davis Center. Born in Moscow in 1967 to a writer’s family, Shrayer emigrated to the United States in 1987. He has authored over fifteen books in English and Russian, among them the internationally acclaimed memoir Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, the collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, and the anthology Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature. His works have been translated into nine languages. Shrayer won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Shrayer’s recent books include A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas (in English) and Antisemitism and the Decline of Russian Village Prose (in Russian). Visit Shrayer’s website at www.shrayer.com


Praise for Of Politics and Pandemics



“Whether lobbing satiric barbs at presidential hopefuls or pondering the bonds of marriage and family in a time of pandemic, Maxim D. Shrayer’s collection, at once lyrical and playful, captures the predicament of a Russian immigrant in Trump-era America with delicious wit and timely acuity.”

-Andrew Sofer, poet and Professor of English, Boston College, 

author of Wave and Dark Matter



“Maxim D. Shrayer’s new collection of poems is a splendid achievement, and just what the doctor ordered for readers reeling from the double assault of political upheavals and raging pandemic. Shrayer’s poems are not only personal, but also culturally rich and politically astute—a rare combination in lyric poetry. The poet-narrator, a melancholy, sometimes self-ironizing sophisticate, is a Russian émigré steeped in the tradition of European literature, and profoundly familiar, from first-hand experience, with what an autocratic regime looks like. His otherness is the source of funny, sane, penetrating observations about events in America in 2020. Maxim D. Shrayer’s Of Politics and Pandemics is a tonic for our times.” 

-Anna Brodsky-Krotkina, Professor of Russian Studies, Washington & Lee

University and columnist, Nezavisimaya gazeta


“The author, or rather his Russian immigrant lyrical hero, regards poetry as a fainting mirror of doubles, in which boundaries of time and space are erased. Reality and memory, everyday life and the absolute of destiny, feelings, fears and hopes, the pandemic present and the historical past, are all split apart and reconnected in the course of Shrayer’s poetical dialogue with himself and others. Both apocalyptic banality and existential suspense need a special poetic perspective: ‘…Can you create/ a living record?’ ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’/’ Can you describe this?’ ‘This? You mean the taste/ of spring on our lips? The April wind?’/ ‘No, the pandemic,’ my double spoke with passion.’ This dialogue recalls Anna Akhmatova’s tragic words in Requiem: ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: I can.’”

-Stefano Garzonio, poet and Professor of Slavic Studies, Pisa University, editor

  of Poesia Russa and Lirici Russi dell’Ottocento 


“I like humor. As the philosopher once said, “I find it funny.” And there is plenty to turn a smile in this collection. At points I even found myself laughing out loud. Only soon after to be confronted with moments of deep despair. You can't live in America at the moment and not find yourself taken aback by the laughable craziness of some things and the incredible desperation of others. Maxim D. Shrayer captures that feeling so well. Without much fanfare, he also makes an urgent case for the thinking person and for a return to decency and civility in our leaders — to which I say: here's to that!”

-Graeme Harper, Editor, New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing and author of Discovering Creative Writing