“Maria Ivanovna Was Reclining on a Settee”: Gleb Uspenskii’s Search for a New Optics

Abstract

To Gleb Uspenskii's contemporaries, his preference for short forms like sketches, notes, and fragments masked an artistic fl aw – his inability to produce a novel. The paper reconsiders Uspenskii's generic choices as a deliberate critique of the novel form. This critique refl ected Uspenskii's anxiety about the signifi cance of individual personality and experience overvalued by the novel. Uspenskii's aspiration to transcend the novel's preoccupation with an individual human fate in order to lay bare the conditions shaping the shared destiny of all led him to exchange the novel's “microscopic” optics for a broader, panoramic lens. Such change in perspective dictated several other elements of his poetics: from rejecting the novel's aesthetics of small detail to reconfi guring the traditional character structure.