The Marked

Oleg Kling was born in 1953 in Kyrgyzstan. In 1961 the family voluntarily moved to the city of Balkhash in Kazakhstan. “That was the only possible happy childhood for me,” the author writes in his autobiography. “It is about this that my first novel ‘An Uninvented Landscape’ is written, published in 1989 in ‘Friendship of Peoples’ (No. 2). As children, we saw and understood if not everything, then many things. But we were also naïve—according to the spirit of the time. When I received my first passport, I was shocked: it turned out I was German, not Russian. Out of naïveté, after finishing school I went to enter the journalism faculty of Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov. I didn’t know that Germans were not admitted to any percent of future students. But again a kind person helped—pitying me—and, in violation of the instructions, accepted my documents. I did well on my exams. And then, when the results of admission came to be checked by the First Department, a terrible scandal broke out. I learned about it only recently. But the deed was done—I became the first German student of the journalism faculty.”

After graduating he worked in district and city newspapers, but, still dreaming since childhood of literary activity, O. Kling entered the full-time postgraduate program at the journalism faculty of Moscow State University, in the Department of History of Russian Literature and Journalism. In 1981 he defended his PhD dissertation on Russian symbolism. He worked as a junior research assistant at the journalism faculty of Moscow State University.

After entering doctoral studies at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1988, in 1996 O. Kling defended his doctoral dissertation on the poetics of symbolism and post-symbolism. After the defense, he was invited to the Philology Faculty of Moscow State University, where since 1996 he has worked as a professor in the Department of Literary Theory. Today he is a professor, Deputy Dean of the Philology Faculty for Research, and Head of the Department of Literary Theory at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Member of the International Writers’ Organization PEN-Club.