In his dissertation, Staging the Soviet Self: Literature, Theater, and Stalinist Culture, 1929-1939, Boris Wolfson, a candidate for the Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures, examines the role that dramatic (”literary”) theater played in constructing the new, specifically Soviet, notion of the self. In a decade that defined literature’s status as a crucial institution of the emerging Stalinist society, Wolfson investigates three writer/playwrights whose literary works and personal stories embody a complex process of negotiating relationships among self, text, and audience. Using the theoretical insights of both literary and theater studies, as well as the writers’ personal diaries and letters, the dissertation is particularly concerned with the ambiguities of interpretation, authorship and identity that arise in the process of transforming literary scripts into stage productions.