Irwin Weil

Irwin Weil (born 1928) is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University. He is noted for his work in promoting cultural exchange and mutual understanding between the USA and the USSR/Russia, and for attracting large numbers of students to his courses. He recorded a popular series of lectures Classics of Russian Literature for The Teaching Company in 2005.

Biography

Irwin Weil was born in 1928 in Cincinnati, Ohio of German Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His father Sidney was a former owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. . Initially majoring in economics at the University of Chicago, he was drawn to Slavic studies after discovering Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in a required literature course and being (in his words) "knocked for a loop". He reports that he ran to a bookstore, picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment, read it in two days, and resolved to learn the language of such a great body of literature.