His grandmother was Sofia Sheinis from Bessarabia. Alexander Zholkovsky graduated from MGU, Russia (1959), earned his Ph. D. in linguistics from the MGU Institute of Oriental Languages (1969), and worked on structural semantics and lexi- cography in collaboration with Professor Igor Mel'cuk (since 1977 at the University of Montreal, Canada). His major publications in these fields include Somali Syntax: Deep and Surface Structures (Moscow, 1971) and Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary of Modern Russian (with .I A. Mel'cuk; Vienna, 1984). His recent work has focused on the phenomenon of what he termed "infinitive poetry" - verses written in sequences of (quasi)-absolute infinitive constructions and sharing a common semantic "halo", with special reference to the poetry of Pasternak, Shershenevich, and Brodsky. He is now preparing an annotated anthology of Russian infinitive poetry ofthe 18th-20th centuries. Professor Zholkovsky has been a recipient of several grants and fellowships, among them those from Cornell University's Society for the Humanities, the Nation- al Humanities Center, North Carolina, and the American Council ofLearned Soci- eties. He was awarded the Prize of the journal Zvezda (The Star) (1998) and USC's Raubenheimer Award (1999). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie ( New Literary Survey).