Mikhail Epshtein, also known as Mikhail Epstein, is one of the leading cultural theorists of the past quarter century, as well as one of the most complex. He has written on subjects as diverse as the American fascination with dinosaurs and the role of apophatic theology (negative theology which describes God by what he is not) in Russian culture; on the meaning of waiting in line in Soviet culture and the "trauma" of the information explosion; on the "mystery" of (former) Soviet hockey invincibility and the sophiological (having to do with the science of divine wisdom, or Sophia) speculations of Daniil Leonidovich Andreev. He has been both a central analyst and publicist for Russian postmodernism as well as its pathologist, having declared it dead in the mid 1990s. He has written both under his own name and under a variety of pseudonyms, such as the sexual theorist Ivan...