Russell Scott Valentino is an associate professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of the 2001 monograph Vicissitudes of Genre in the Russian Nineteenth-Century Novel, co-translator and editor of Carlo Michelstaedter's 1910 treatise Persuasion and Rhetoric, translator of two books of experimental essays by the Yugoslav public intellectual Predrag Matvejevic (Between Exile and Asylum: An Eastern Epistolary and The Other Venice), of Sabit Madaliev's Silence of the Sufi (2006), and of the 1960 Istrian novel by Fulvio Tomizza Materada. His essays, articles, and translations have appeared in journals such as Two Lines, Slavic Review, 91st Meridian, The Iowa Review, eXchanges, POROI, Circumference, and Modern Fiction Studies.