Emeritus Professor Gennady Barabtarlo was born in 1949 in Moscow, U.S.S.R. On completing his studies at the University of Moscow in 1972 and defending a degree thesis on Pasternak's poetics, he received a Diploma in Russian Philology. Between 1970 and 1978 he was a fellow, and later an academic secretary at the Moscow Pushkin Literary Museum.

On November 8, 1979, he, with his wife and daughter, emigrated and became refugees first in Europe and then in the USA, where he entered a doctoral programme at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a PhD in Russian Literature (minor in Slavonic linguistics) in 1984, upon defending a dissertation on Nabokov. He then was invited to the University of Missouri, initially as a visiting professor (1984-85) and then as Assistant Professor (1985-1990), Associate Professor (1991–1995), and Professor, a position he kept until his retirement as Emeritus Professor in 2017. He was chairman of the Department of German and Russian Studies in 1999-2005.

Professor Barabtarlo has published several books and about seventy essays, book chapters, and articles in English and Russian, on literary topics ranging from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn. The majority of those publications, however, are devoted to Nabokov, a subject on which Professor Barabtarlo is considered something of an authority. His latest major books on Nabokov are Sochinenie Nabokova (in Russian, Ivan Limbach: St Petersburg, 2011) and Insomniac Dreams (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2017). Professor Barabtarlo has also translated a number of Nabokov's books into Russian. From 1979 he kept a regular correspondence with Nabokov's widow, sister, and son.