Irina Paperno teaches Russian literature and intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of "Who, What Am I?": Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self , Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams ; and Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia , all from Cornell, and Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior .