Robert Louis Jackson

Robert Louis Jackson was B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, where he taught from 1954 until his retirement in 2002. Author of six monographs, seven edited volumes, and over a hundred articles, Jackson is best known for his groundbreaking work on the art of Dostoevsky; he is likewise renowned for his extraordinary readings of Chekhov's work. Jackson wrote extensively on Turgenev and Tolstoy as well, exploring in all his scholarship the moral,...See more

Robert Louis Jackson was B. E. Bensinger Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, where he taught from 1954 until his retirement in 2002. Author of six monographs, seven edited volumes, and over a hundred articles, Jackson is best known for his groundbreaking work on the art of Dostoevsky; he is likewise renowned for his extraordinary readings of Chekhov's work. Jackson wrote extensively on Turgenev and Tolstoy as well, exploring in all his scholarship the moral, religious, and philosophical questions he sensed at the very heart of Russian literature and culture. As one of the architects of Yale's Slavic Department; as creator and convener of the Annual Yale Slavic Conference; as founder, then president, of both the International Dostoevsky Society and the International Chekhov Society, Jackson contributed palpably to the development of Slavic Languages and Literatures--both the Department and the field that gave him the freedom to work on what mattered to him most, in a way that felt entirely his own. See less