George Gibian was a professor of Russian and comparative literature at Cornell University. He was a Fullbright, Guggenheim, American Philosophical Society, and Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and the author of The Man in the Black Coat: Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, The Interval of Freedom: Russian Literature During the Thaw, and Tolstoj and Shakespeare. In addition he edited several works of classical Russian literature and wrote for the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the Christian Science Monitor, and Newsday. He died in 1999.
