Draft:Kirill Kobrin

Kirill Kobrin (Russian: Кири́лл Рафаи́лович Ко́брин; born 23 August 1964) is a historian and writer writing in Russian and English.

Biography
Kirill Kobrin was born in Gorky, USSR, on 23 August 1964. In 1986 Kobrin graduated from the History Department of Gorky State University. From 1986 to 2000, he taught courses on European and American history at Gorky State Pedagogical University (later renamed Nizhny Novgorod State Pedagogical University). In 1993 he defended his PhD thesis in Medieval Studies, long afterwards remaining the only specialist in medieval Wales in Russia.

In the late 1980s, Kobrin was active in the Soviet underground rock scene. He wrote lyrics and took part in the recording sessions of the band Khronop (Russian: Хроноп, after Julio Cortázar’s book of parables Historias de cronopios y de famas (Cronopios and Famas), 1962), which he had co-founded; together with his bandmate Vadim Demidov, he also launched a side project called Holden Caulfield. In 1987, he helped found the Gorky rock club. Kobrin published the first local samizdat magazine, ProRock , dedicated to underground music, as well as another music periodical in Gorky later on. He left the Soviet rock underground scene at the height of perestroika, in 1989, as the ideological censorship and government-imposed bans were being lifted.

Kobrin has been writing fiction and non-fiction prose since the mid-1980s and appearing in Russian literary periodicals since the early 1990s. In 1992, together with the Nizhny Novgorod poet Marina Kulakova, he began publishing Urbi, a literary almanac. Since 1994, the journal has been published in St. Petersburg and co-edited by Alexei Purin. Kobrin resigned from Urbi in 2000.

His first book, a collection of short stories entitled Подлинные приключения на вымышленных территориях (Real Adventures in Imaginary Territories), came out in 1994; since then, he has released 30 more fiction and non-fiction books.

Since 2000 Kobrin has lived in Prague, London, Chengdu, Riga, Bucharest, Sofia, Vienna, and Berlin.

In 2000, having moved to Prague, he joined the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Russian Service, where he worked up until 2013, occupying the position of managing editor for the last three years.

At the same time, in 2000 Kobrin joined the editorial team of the journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Observer), and in 2005 became editor of the journal Neprikosnovennyj zapas (Emergency Rations), where he has been editor-in-chief since 2021 until present.

From 2006 to 2017, he was a columnist for Latvian (Rigas Laiks, Arterritory, Studija) and Russian print and online periodicals (Polit.ru, Colta.ru, Vedomosti). From 2016 to 2020, Kobrin regularly contributed to OpenDemocracy’s project oDR, and since 2018 he has been writing for the Lithuanian magazine Nemunas. Together with Andrey Levkin, he founded post(non)fiction, an online project about literature and art.

In 2017 Kobrin returned to teaching. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at Sichuan University (Chengdu, Sichuan, China, 2017–2018), the University of Vienna (2022), and the Art Academy of Latvia (2018–present).

His books have been translated into English, Ukrainian and Latvian; his essays and short stories have been published in Latvian, English, Lithuanian, German, French, Italian, Turkish and Chinese.

Writing style
Kirill Kobrin is one of the few writers writing in Russian that cultivate the essay genre. He predominantly identifies with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of essay writing that dates back to Thomas De Quincey, G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell, leading all the way up to Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Chatwin and Julian Barnes. Some critics have hailed him as the “Russian Borges” and “one of the founders of Russian psychogeography”, noting the versatility and encyclopedism of his literary and academic work. When it comes to fiction, Kobrin is known for writing detective prose; aside from the greats of the mystery genre, he has been strongly influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Bruce Chatwin, Julio Cortázar and Flann O'Brien.

Together with Andrey Levkin, Kirill Kobrin invented a new genre, post(non)fiction -- a mixture of essay, fiction, literary sketch, and even academic analysis.

Kobrin’s approach to academic historical research is a combination of the history of ideas, British Marxist historiography, and classical positivism of the late 19th century.