United States
In 1975, Kazhdan's son, the mathematician David Kazhdan, emigrated to the United States, where he accepted a position at Harvard University. This produced an immediate change in Kazhdan's situation in the Soviet Union; his wife, Musja, was fired from her position at a Moscow publishing house and censorship of his work by his superiors in the Soviet academic establishment increased. In October 1978 Alexander and Musja left the Soviet Union, having received a visa for immigration to Israel, coming to the United States three years afterward. In February 1979 they arrived at Dumbarton Oaks, a center for Byzantine studies in Washington, D.C., where Kazhdan held the position of senior research associate until his death.
Kazhdan's first major publications in English were collaborative: People and Power in Byzantium (1982), a broad ranging study of Byzantine society, was written with Giles Constable; Studies in Byzantine literature (1984) with Simon Franklin; and Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1985) with Ann Wharton Epstein. His greatest English-language project was likewise a massive collaborative effort: the three-volume Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991), edited by Kazhdan, was the first reference work of the sort ever to be published, and remains an indispensable point of departure for all areas of Byzantine studies. He wrote approximately 20%, or about 1,000, of the entries in the Dictionary, which are signed with his initials A.K.
As Kazhdan became more comfortable with English, his pace of publication once again matched that of his Russian years. His later scholarship is above all marked with a growing concern with Byzantine literature, particularly hagiography.
Kazhdan died in Washington, D.C. in 1997. His death cut short his work on a monumental History of Byzantine Literature; however, the first volume of this work, covering the period from 650 to 850, was published in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Kazhdan, Biography
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