Ilya's main fields of expertise are Russian Romanticism and Realism, the history of emotions, nineteenth- century intellectual and spiritual history, translation theory, and the cultural interpretation of mystifications and forgeries (“physallidology,” from “soap bubble” in Greek). As the list of his works shows, he is interested in a range of different authors, periods, and approaches to the text. He also tries out different scholarly forms, from the positivistic academic commentary to the scholarly essay and parody. However, his overarching principle is a focus on a literary text or a group of texts as the intersection and interplay of various cultural and historical forces – ideology, politics, psychology, law, etc. In 2020, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Ilya's most recent book focuses on liminal and provocative aspects of literary translation and discusses works of Russian, Serbian, French, and American writers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. His previous book reconstructs the “emotional biography” of Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852)—the father of Russian Romanticism, who influenced several generations of Russian authors from Pushkin to Vladimir Solov'ev and Aleksandr Blok. His most personal book, The Graphomaniac: Dmitry Khvostov and Russian Culture" investigates the phenomenon of anti-poetry in Russian literary tradition from the eighteenth through the twenty first century and focuses on the extraordinary literary biography and cultural function of the king of Russian bad poets, Count Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov (1757-1835). In this book, he argues that Khvostov’s phenomenon (the worst of all Russian writers, Russia’s anti-Pushkin) reveals the uniqueness of Russian poetry-centric culture.