Maya Kucherskaya

Maya Alexandrovna Kucherskaya (Russian: Ма́йя Алекса́ндровна Куче́рская; born May 2, 1970 in Moscow, USSR) is a Russian fiction writer, columnist, critic and pedagogue.

She has earned degrees in Philology and Russian Literature (Moscow State University, 1997), as well as a PhD in Slavic Languages & Literatures (UCLA, 1999). She is a professor of Philology and head of the School of Literary Excellence at the HSE University in Moscow, as well as the recipient of multiple awards, such as the "Big Book Award" (2021), and "Molodaya Gvardia" (2006). She has earned the title of "Best Teacher" multiple times at the Higher School of Economics (HSE).

Her academic interests include Russian popular culture, 20th-century and contemporary prose, the 19th century writer Nikolai Leskov, and the mythology of mass consciousness.

Biography
Maya Kucherskaya was born in 1970 in the USSR. She graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1992, going on to defend her 1997 thesis "Russian Yuletide Story and the Problem of the Canon in Modern Literature" and earning a degree in Russian Literature. From 1992 to 1995, she studied in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in UCLA, and in 1999, she defended her dissertation, titled "Grand Duke Constantine Romanov in Russian Cultural Mythology".

She was a columnist from 2005 to 2015 for the newspaper Vedomosti (Ведомости).

In 2011, she became an associate professor and eventually full professor in the School of Philological Studies at the HSE University in Moscow, where she also supervises the creative writing program.

Work
Dr. Kucherskaya has published multiple Russian-language bestsellers, including Modern Patericon (2005), translated into English as “Faith and Humor” in 2011 by Alexei Bayer, and a reworking of her doctoral thesis, titled The Rain God (2006).

In 2014, she took part in a recording of theatrical readings of "Karinena", and published a collection of short stories titled Lamentations for the Departed Art Teacher. In an interview with Gazeta, she said about the series, “it turned out to be a strange family, as if all these texts were from the same mother, but from different fathers. An absurdist father, an avant-garde father, a harsh realist father, a faceless father who ran away after the first date, and the child turned out to be raised by a single mother."

In 2016, she published an article in the journal The Russian Review, titled "Literary Borrowing in the Work of N. S. Leskov". She then published a biography of Leskov in 2021.