Nineteenth-century Russia Research Articles

Introduction: Melmoth's Global Afterlives

In this introduction to the special issue, the editors read Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and its circuitous afterlives through the lens of recent, revised critical understandings of globalgothic. Driven by its striking depiction of evil, its eccentric narrative structure, and its atmospheric intensity, Melmoth the Wanderer's cultural impact reverberated across nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures and visual media, an influence which continues to evolve to this day. Significantly, for a text preoccupied with the problematics of translation, transcription, and transliteration, Melmoth's network of global influence is fraught with anomalies and complications. From its first appearance in nineteenth-century Russia in French translation to its rediscovery in twentieth-century Latin America, the global afterlives of Melmoth expose the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of transnational textuality, both in Maturin's era and our own. The introduction ends with an overview of the essays collected in this volume – the first scholarly study dedicated to tracing the many afterlives of Maturin's Melmoth.

Non-Alcoholic Beverages in Nineteenth Century Russia

Non-Alcoholic Beverages in Nineteenth Century Russia

A Veblenian View of Russian Folklore: Instrumental or Ceremonial Habits of Thought?

The Veblenian concept of various dispositions driving social behavior is applied in a discourse analysis of folkloric material. A sample of 935 proverbs and sayings represents the nineteenth century Russian popular discourse on housekeeping, work, consumption, spending, borrowing, lending, and debt. We compare the beliefs and messages conveyed in folklore with the ideas of Thorstein Veblen. The core values of the past and the traditional habits of thought turn out to be much less ceremonial than conventional wisdom might imply. In Veblenian parlance, they are “productive” and conducive to the well-being of the household. We conclude that the ceremonial character/nature of traditional institutions might be greatly exaggerated, whereas their instrumentality is understated.

The “Economy of Incarnation” and the Cherubic Hymn in Nineteenth-Century Russia

The Russian Orthodox liturgy constantly hovers on the boundary of representation and supposed real presence of the divine. This tension is dramatically illustrated by the Cherubic Hymn, which purports to “mystically represent” angelic song and accompanies the transfer of the bread and wine that will be transformed into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. The Cherubic Hymn was the most commonly set liturgical text in modern Russia, attracting many of Russia’s leading composers, including Dmitry Bortniansky, Mikhail Glinka, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Milii Balakirev (who arranged the text to Mozart’s Ave verum corpus), and Alexander Kastalsky. In this article I analyze Cherubic Hymns from Bortniansky to Kastalsky to demonstrate a gradual shift from an emphasis on formal clarity and localized mimetic devices to a musical idiom based on medieval chant melodies and folk-inspired polyphony. I argue that this shift embodied a profound transformation in Russian religious thought across the long nineteenth century, wherein rational, enlightenment sensibilities ceded to a mystical emphasis on the interpenetrability of the material and spiritual worlds, or the “economy of incarnation.” Drawing upon intellectuals ranging from the novelist Nikolai Gogol to theologian Sergius Bulgakov and prominent critics of the so-called New Direction that emerged in Russian sacred music at the end of the nineteenth century, I show that the Cherubic Hymn, and liturgical music at large, became invested with the ability not simply to imitate angelic song but to join in it, a perceptible and embodied participation in the activity of the divine. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate the persistence of sacred epistemologies in the modern world and develop an analytic approach that attends at once to musical detail and liturgical meaning.

Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel by Margarita Vaysman (review)

Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel by Margarita Vaysman (review)

Scientific Modernity vs. Cultural Tradition in Imperial Russia

Abstract The emergence of modern science in Russia was a belated and rather abrupt development, unfolding rapidly in the 1860s and significantly challenging Russian traditional culture rooted in the Orthodox religion. As in Western Europe, the spread of scientific ideas that increasingly undermined the religious worldview was controversial and unsettling to many conservative thinkers. In Russia, however, controversy around the religious implications of science was more ideologically charged and complex because it involved the old, waxing question of Russia’s relationship with the West. While Dostoevskii’s attitude towards science has been a subject of long-standing debate, many questions remain overlooked and some are highly controversial. Dostoevskii’s reaction to J. S. Mill (mediated by Strakhov) is one important aspect that has been overlooked in current historiography. Mill’s Logic, widely known to European readers, played a significant role not only in creating the modern philosophy of science but also in stimulating the debate on the relationship between science and religion. By placing the views of Strakhov and Dostoevskii into a European intellectual context, this essay offers a re-evaluation of the theme of science in the works of the two most prominent conservative thinkers in nineteenth-century Russia.

Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song by Adalyat Issiyeva (review)

Reviewed by: Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song by Adalyat Issiyeva David Salkowski Representing Russia's Orient: From Ethnography to Art Song. By Adalyat Issiyeva. (AMS Studies in Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. [xxi, 406 p. ISBN 9780190051365 (hardback), $61; also available as e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. Of the many important terms Adalyat Issiyeva introduces to the nonspecialist reader in this remarkable book, perhaps the central one is inorodets, [End Page 621] meaning literally a person "of different descent" (p. 10). Applied to ethnic non-Russians in the Russian Empire, the term highlights one of the fundamental contexts underlying this study: the vast landmass of the Russian Empire was inhabited by a multitude of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups who were regarded as "others" by European Russians. Issiyeva cites a surprisingly candid Russian military officer who notes the irony that it is the local community (in this case, the Chuvash people), not the minority, governing Russians, who were the "others" (p. 68). This paradox of imperial incorporation and the way Russians negotiated it through scholarly and cultural production animates the pages of this impressive study. While on its surface Issiyeva's work is an investigation of musical representations of imperial "others" in nineteenth-century Russian music, it accomplishes far more, giving a deep, fluid, and incisive analysis of the relationship between empire and ethnographic knowledge. Through meticulous and detailed work with sometimes obscure sources, she provides an account of the development of (musical) ethnography in imperial Russia. This in turn establishes essential context for understanding the better-known names of Russian music, as they are themselves products of a multi-ethnic, expanding empire. The subtitle of the book reflects both its structure and a greater trajectory of knowledge production. Issiyeva's first three chapters concern the representation of the Russian Empire's non-Russian ethnicities within folk song and ethnographic studies about the folk music of Russia's Asian subjects. The second group of three analyzes the ways in which this knowledge of imperial "others" was metabolized by composers and institutions into art song, a genre that, as Issiyeva notes, has often been overlooked by scholars of Russian nationalism and orientalism, in comparison to opera and symphonic music (p. 6). In chapter 1, Issiyeva focuses on representations of imperial others in a number of folk genres, including the bylinas (an epic oral form of poetry), soldier songs, and children's songs. This story rhymes with larger European narratives of seeking national identity in the folk traditions of an imagined past while also speaking to the specific challenges of imperial governance. A particularly compelling example is found in Alexander Nikulin's Collection of Songs Compiled for Children, published in two editions in Polish-speaking Vilna (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1870 and 1881 (Sbornik pesen sostavlennyi dlia detei Aleksandrom Nikulinym [Vilnius: A. G. Syrkina, 1870] and Sbornik pesen sostavlennyi Alexandrom Nikulinym, odobrennyi Uchenym Komitetom Narodnogo Prosvyashcheniia dlia upotrebleniia v shkolakh Vilenskogo Uchebnogo Okruga [Vilnius: A. G. Syrkina, 1881]). Issiyeva notes that from the first edition to the second—which spans a decade of uprisings and repressions in the imperially controlled Kingdom of Poland—an innocuous children's collection expands into an ideological tool (pp. 37–38). These Russian-language songs, approved for use in Polish schools, use stereotypes of Caucasian subjects to demonize the "bad" imperial other (the "evil Chechen" of Mikhail Lermontov's "Cossack Lullaby") and model the proper integration of the "good" subject, exemplified by assimilated Georgians in the song "Appeal." Issiyeva notes that the melody of this latter song contains references to both Mikhail Glinka's art song "Do Not Sing for Me Thy Song of Georgia" and an aria from A. Verstovskiĭ's Askold's Grave (p. 39), thus folding these "good" neighbors into an imperial frame on a musical level. [End Page 622] In chapter 2, Issiyeva demonstrates the role of scholars in supplying knowledge of local customs and traditions in Russian Asia to imperial officials as well as the ethnographic work generated by certain military officials themselves. This chapter also shines important light on the history of ethnography outside Europe. For instance...

Lower‐Class Reading in Late Imperial Russia

AbstractThis article demonstrates widespread engagement of lower‐class people with the written word in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian Empire, in rural and urban locales, in homes, workplaces, and social spaces. We explore how lower‐class people read: the daily habits, personal relationships, and social spaces that shaped engagement with texts, and especially collective reading, a widespread phenomenon that extended the reach of the written word to less‐ or non‐literate audiences. Many lower‐class Russians experienced reading as a collective, public, aural activity, not a solitary, private, internal one. Reading was entwined with the rhythms of everyday social life and provoked critical thought and active engagement within countless lower‐class reading groups, as evidenced by collective letter‐writing and observations of post‐reading discussions. This article therefore contributes to scholarship exploring lower‐class Russians’ conscious and meaningful engagement with the textual world, and by association with late imperial Russia’s transforming social and political spheres.

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, and Epilepsy.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a brilliant nineteenth-century Russian novelist who had a seizure disorder that influenced his life and his creativity.His novels explore issues of love, faith, doubt, morality and reflect his personal experience with epilepsy. He was a keen observer of familial psychodynamics. The Brothers Karamazov (1880)was Dostoyevsky's longest and last novel, completed just a few months before his death from a pulmonary hemorrhage, most likely related to his life-long habit of cigarette smoking.In this novel, he explores the subtility of interpersonal relationships and the psychopathology within the Karamazov family and how one of the three brothers, Smerdyakov, uses psychogenic non-epileptic seizures as an alibi to get away with the perfect crime of patricide.

A.K. Ramanujan: A Poet of Different Cultures and Languages

The paper explores the impact of different cultures and languages in the poetic writings of A. K. Ramanujan. He has a full command over Indian culture, scriptures and rituals. Tamil, Kannad, Sanskrit and English languages are well known to him. Language is a very important tool in the formulation of a culture and its aesthetics, as it is a medium of expression. Without language no human culture can be imagined. Culture is a manifestation of the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular group of human society. It is a code of conduct which guides and control a certain human society. Ramanujan was deeply rooted in Indian culture and tradition, which is evident in his work. However, his exposure to Western education, particularly his studies in the United States, also influenced his literary style and themes. As a result, Ramanujan's work reflects a unique blend of different cultures and languages, and he is known for bridging the gap between Indian and Western literary traditions. Oxford Advanced Learner Dictionary defines culture as “the customs and beliefs; ways of life and social organization of a particular country or group” (373). The cultural and linguistic influences are evident in the literature of any nation, therefore, it always becomes a perfect source of information. Literature of any nation keeps the record of its history, geography, culture and tradition. For instance, we have to study Leo Tolstoy to know the history and geography of nineteenth century Russian literature; similarly, if we want to know something about the English culture, we have to study English literature as literature is a part of culture. In the same way, there are several languages and cultures that are observed in India and each of them are closely connected with the theme of Indianness and this is how it paves the way of unity in diversity.

The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature by Marina Zilbergerts

Reviewed by: The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature by Marina Zilbergerts Wendy Zierler Marina Zilbergerts. The Yeshiva and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 184 pp. It has long been acknowledged that deep knowledge of biblical and rabbinic literature on the part of early modern Hebrew poets and prose writers played a vital role in the creation of modern Hebrew literature and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. As Benjamin Harshav notes, “Secular Hebrew poetry grew in the soil of Hebrew study in the religious society against which all Hebrew poets rebelled in their youth.”1 In light of this, Marina Zilbergerts’s new study of the yeshiva and the rise of modern Hebrew literature might seem, at first, like old news. Far from it, however. Whereas previous studies of this subject emphasized the role of Haskalah, Zionism, or secularism, Zilbergerts examines the rise of the modern yeshiva, with its elite ethos of Torah lishmah (Torah study for its own sake), as a way of explaining the seemingly miraculous rise of Hebrew literary culture. The book sets out to answer several questions from this vantage point: How and why did modern Hebrew literature come to be, and why in the setting of late nineteenth-century Russia? Given the utter impracticality of creating a literature in a language that no one actually spoke, and the ideological push in Russian culture for writing that was materially useful to society, how did these mid- and late nineteenth-century Hebrew writers make the case for their writing? Zilbergerts argues that the text-centeredness of the modern yeshiva led to an orientation where texts became more real than the physical world, where the “play and pleasure” of textual learning took on heightened importance. The result of viewing Torah as an omnisignificant literature to be interpreted and debated through a variety of hermeneutic and literary strategies was a blurring of the conventional boundary between sacred and secular Hebrew texts. All this laid the groundwork for these text-centered values to be transferred to secular Hebrew literary production once these young writers left the yeshiva. In addition to considering the autotelic value of text in yeshiva culture, Zilbergerts considers corresponding patterns of study and ideological dissent among nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox seminarians. Yeshiva and Russian Orthodox students alike experienced both the exhilaration of elite study and deep [End Page 240] despair over their lack of practical skills and economic opportunities, despite their erudition. Seminary-educated Russian nihilist writers such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) and Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836–1861) expressed deep dissatisfaction with their church education, along with a strong desire to achieve social usefulness. Nevertheless, these nihilist writers often mimicked the practices of Russian Orthodox hermeneutics in their critical writing, a cultural pattern that was reproduced by disaffected ex-yeshiva students. Indeed, even when yeshiva students abandoned their studies, they carried with them a reverence for textuality for its own sake. Under the pressures and influence of Russian nihilism, Hebrew writers such as Avraham Uri, Shaul, and Yiẓḥak Aizik Kovner attacked the maskilic Hebrew language and literature for ignoring the pressing material issues of society. Still, these same critics often resorted to the Hebrew wordplays and exegetical practices of the very rabbinic/maskilic culture they sought to critique. Even as these writers sought to detach themselves from the constraints of their yeshiva background, they kept returning to the practices and aesthetic models of Torah lishmah, redirecting these practices to the creation of their new secular Hebrew poetry and prose. Moshe Leib Lilienblum thus inveighs against the superstitions and backward practices of traditional Judaism, including kest marriage, and the failure of the yeshiva system to provide young men with a practical vocation, only to defend talmudic literature against maskilic charges of nonsense. Similarly, ex-Volozhin Yeshiva students Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky and Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik produced literary works that decry the dead-in-life nature of text study, but also revel in it with a kind of sublimated sexual energy. “The freedom to engage with Jewish texts and ideas without exterior motive,” Zilbergerts argues, “along with the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, was arguably...

Revising the History of Nitchevo with Text Archives

This article focuses on the way nitchevo, a nineteenth-century Russian borrowing, was adopted into the English language. In order to investigate the history of the word, six digital text archives were considered. The results of the research are promising: not only do they allow one to trace antedatings for both senses, which updates the treatment of nitchevo in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but they also shed light on its semantic development, spelling variation, and route of transmission. Tellingly, albeit unsurprisingly, the evidence suggests that the press is responsible for boosting the recognition of the word on both sides of the Atlantic. All this indicates that the potential of modern research tools, including British and American newspaper archives, remains to be fully explored.

Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia, by Colleen Lucey

In her insightful analysis of literary and visual images of women who engaged in commodified sexual exchange in nineteenth-century Russia, Colleen Lucey shows that the very notion of women’s love being ‘for sale’ confounded the cultural elite. Increasing awareness of the slippery slope between engaging in commercial sex and marrying for money resulted in disorientation, inspiration, imitation and horror, all of which can be seen in late imperial Russian art and fiction. In the context of debates about gender, class and sexuality, the theme of prostitution served, writes Lucey, as a ‘metaphor to explore shifting economies of desire founded on transaction’ (p. 14). Starting with St Petersburg, ‘Russia’s Babylon’ (p. 19), Lucey demonstrates how the most Westernised city in the Empire functioned in the popular imagination as the most debauched. She analyses the way mid-century writings and drawings imagined commercial sex in the capital, both in terms of its erotic promises and perils. Redemption narratives, so common in Russian literature as to inspire parodies, reflected men’s fantasies of saving (and often having sex with) ‘fallen women’. Male writers, according to Lucey, got tangled up in their own confusion about sex and gender, especially when they tried to make sense of how encounters in urban spaces such as St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect blurred the lines between outright commercial and casual sexual encounters.

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia by Anna Schur (review)

Reviewed by: The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russiaby Anna Schur Muireann Maguire Schur, Anna. The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2022. xii + 224 pp. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $120.00; $39.95. W hentwo minor characters in Shakespeare's Henry VI(Part II) famously agree to 'kill all the lawyers', the specific source of their ire is lawyers' ability to alter lives by writing down words: namely, the fact that 'parchment, being scribbl'd o'er, should undo a man' (Act IV, Scene II). Anna Schur's meticulously researched and subtly argued monograph does not, thankfully, endorse genocide of the legal profession. Instead, she explores, in the context of nineteenth-century Russia, the resentful perception of lawyers as pseudo-authors, whose powers of invention, imagination and rhetoric, freely exercised in the courtroom, allowed them to rewrite — and sometimes to undo — the lives of ordinary men and women. Schur's title, The Letters and the Law, introduces these two conflicting perspectives: that of writers, whose enduring post-Pushkinian status as their nation's conscience endowed them with quasi-legal, and certainly with moral, authority; and that of the newly formed body of professional lawyers, particularly defence attorneys, practising after court reform supposedly modernized the Russian judiciary in 1864. While we learn about individuals on both sides of the debate, Schur's focus remains on particular celebrity lawyers and the literary reactions they provoked from leading authors, during a time-frame bracketed by the 1864 reform and the 1905 Revolution. Within this timeframe, she revisits some of the remarkable epithets inveighed against the legal profession, all adopted and recycled by its critics, ranging from journalistic invective to literary caricatures. They included 'adulterers of thought' (a phrase Dostoevskii borrowed from another source for use in The Brothers Karamazov), the 'attorney-spider' and ' premier amoureux' (both coined by Saltykov-Shchedrin, referring [End Page 155]respectively to the unscrupulousness and ingenuous eloquence he attributed to different types of lawyer), and lirstvo(or 'lyre-playing' — Dostoevskii, again, inveighing against empty eloquence). All this obloquy contributed to the widespread public perception of all lawyers (but especially defence lawyers) as greedy, hypocritical and ignorant — a calumny often combined with antisemitic vilification. Ironically, as Schur shows, newly qualified advocates often modelled their own reputations on those of acclaimed authors, either by actually publishing literature or simply by attempting to accrue, through psychological insight, ethical excellence, or rhetorical brilliance, the magic dust of Russian writers' moral prestige. Other scholars have recently studied other aspects of legal-literary relations in nineteenth-century Russia — notably Harriet Murav ( Russia's Legal Fictions, Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), Gary Rosenshield ( Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, The Jury Trial, and The Law, Madison, WI, 2005), and most recently Claire Whitehead's study of nineteenth-century Russian lawyers who also penned genre fiction, The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection(Cambridge, 2018). Shur's work is informed by all of the above, in addition to extensive study of Russian legal history. The Letters and the Law's original contribution is to show how the legal profession was conceptualizedin late nineteenth-century Russia. Chapter one surveys lawyers' experimental self-fashioning as moral and literary arbiters, drawing on contemporary speeches, memoirs and publications; some advocates were honoured with election to the Academy of Sciences (like Tolstoi's friend, the judge A. F. Koni, who also takes credit for sharing the anecdote that inspired the former's novel, Resurrection). Chapter two re-examines how the celebrated defence lawyer, and accomplished literary scholar, Vladimir Spasovich, won the lurid 1876 Kronenberg child abuse case in favour of the accused (rather like a negative of Atticus Finch). Schur evaluates successive polemics against both Spasovich's ethics and his eloquence, mounted by Dostoevskii, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Vladimir Rozanov, all pillorying the so-called 'Polish lawyer' (p. 58) for the very skills that won the case, and (in Rozanov's 1897 attack) for his implied claim to reputational parity with writers. Chapter three studies the negative clichés accreting around lawyers...

Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by Katherine Bowers (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic by Katherine Bowers Margarita Vaysman Bowers, Katherine. Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2022. 264 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Works cited. Index. $65.00. In the last decade, studies of the Russian Gothic have become a healthy subfield, with new publications appearing every year. This growth is spurred on by the development of the field at large: interdisciplinary Gothic studies are booming globally, with three research centres in the UK alone (in Manchester, Sheffield and Stirling) and a specialized Gothic Studies journal, published by Edinburgh University Press. But it is also thanks to studies like Bowers's that this once marginal topic is now an important component of both academic discussions and curricula specifically in Russian studies. Writing Fear urges us to rethink our assumptions about an intriguing and understudied aspect of nineteenth-century Russian realist writing: its relationship with popular literary genres, especially the Gothic. While isolated cases, like Fedor Dostoevskii's interest in sensationalist newspaper reports or Aleksandr Pushkin's Gothic parodies, are well-known, no study so far has charted a sustained timeline of Russian realism's engagement with Gothic literature and art. In keeping with other excellent recent nineteenth-century Russian Gothic studies, like Valeria Sobol's Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (Ithaca, NY, 2020), Bowers's monograph focuses on both canonical and less well-known texts. Sophisticated close readings of the usual Gothic suspects like Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol´, Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevskii and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin are accompanied by chapters on the once prominent but now almost forgotten authors like Evgeniia Tur, Evgenii Grebenka and Boris Savinkov. This unusually wide span, as well as Bowers's impressive command of both recent global theories of the Gothic and primary Russian sources, makes Writing Fear invaluable for anyone reading, [End Page 157] or writing, about Russian realism. This book makes bold but convincing theoretical claims, while retaining an accessible tone that does not take its readers' knowledge of the subject for granted. Bowers's main argument does not only concern the presence of Gothic elements in Russian realist fiction, the scale of which has previously been underappreciated even in the landmark studies on the subject. Importantly, she also explains why the Gothic — as style, narrative mode and set of tropes — was so important for Russian realists: it allowed them to depict 'transgression, trauma, or injustice', 'engaging readers on the deeply affective level through building up fear' (p. 10). Bowers uses the term 'Gothic realism' ('moments when authors writing in what we recognise as a realist style turn to gothic narrative devices, using the genre as a tool to articulate a facet of lived experience through the affective engagement of the reader', p. 10), to discuss a range of literary phenomena. The introductory chapter, 'Russian Realism and the Gothic', charts the evolution of this term from its first use in Mikhail Bakhtin's unpublished dissertation to recent scholarly re-appraisals of Russian realism. Part one, 'Gothic Migrations', focuses on 'the way Russian writers began using Gothic elements outside of Gothic works' (p. 12). Chapter one, 'A Russian Reader's Gothic Library', provides a long-awaited update on the themes first explored by Vadim Vatsuro. Chapter two, 'Gothic Transmutations in Pushkin and Gogol´', focuses on the Gothic 'aesthetic, authenticity and parody' (p. 12) in Evgenii Onegin (1825–32) and Dead Souls (1842), two texts that were 'deeply influential in the development of Russian realist poetics' (p. 12). Chapter three, 'Russian Landscapes in a Gothic Frame', compares the 'Gothic narrative frames' (p. 13) of Ivan Goncharov's 'Oblomov's Dream' (1849) and Turgenev's 'Bezhin Lea' (1851). Chapter four, 'The Idiot: Dostoevskii's Gothic Novel', explores the effect of the Gothic on Dostoevskii's experiments with the novelistic form. Part Two, 'Gothic Realism', 'illuminate[s] the function of the gothic as a formal innovation within literary realism' (p. 13). Chapter five, 'Physiological Petersburg, Gothic Petersburg', focuses on Gothic urban landscapes, and the way writers like Nikolai Nekrasov used Gothic tropes in a didactic way. Chapter six, 'Gothic Subjectivity and the Woman's Question', compares the use of marginalized...

The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Poignant Story of Psychological and Social Reality

Set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Russia, the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych delves into the life and ultimate demise of the protagonist, Ivan Ilych. Leo Tolstoy skillfully presents the psychological aspects of Ivan Ilych’s existence with his intricate narrative style, thoughtful analysis, and true-to-life characterization. This paper attempts to find how Tolstoy explores the universal human struggle between external societal expectations and the internal desires of the individual through the protagonist of the novella. As the story progresses, we see how Ivan’s life, initially driven by social ambition and conformity, gradually erodes as he confronts the harsh reality of his forthcoming death. Besides, Tolstoy also exposes the hypocritical nature of societal norms and conventions, unmasking the shallowness and moral emptiness that underlie its seemingly respectable camouflage. For this research, the analytical research method has been followed. For materials, primary and secondary sources have been used. The findings of the paper indicate the existential crisis and the spiritual renewal of the title character. This is the first time attempt has been made by the author to find the social and psychological reality that dominated 19th-century Russian society. This paper has not been published in conference or seminar proceedings and journals.

Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine by Jessica Zychowicz (review)

Reviewed by: Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine by Jessica Zychowicz Kathleen Mitchell-Fox Zychowicz, Jessica. Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Ukraine. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2020. xx + 399 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $93.00. In Superfluous Women, Jessica Zychowicz presents a detailed interpretation of the protest and countercultural activities of Ukraine's inter-revolutionary generation, the generation who came of age in the decade between the Orange Revolution (2004–05) and Euromaidan (2013–14). Zychowicz's title is an ironic reference to the lishnii chelovek of nineteenth-century Russia. In her usage, it alludes to the initial dismissive response towards the feminist and anti-establishment movements as a superfluous generation protesting for protest's sake. Thus, the aim of Superfluous Women is two-fold: firstly, to demonstrate and decode the significance of inter-revolutionary protest in Ukraine, thereby reclaiming its 'superfluous women'; secondly, to provide a nuanced perspective on Ukrainian art and protest between 2004–14. The latter balances the decentring of Western liberal assumptions that all protest is a cry for closer European ties with a renegotiation of the Soviet past's relevance to the 'decommunizing' present. From the start, Zychowicz positions herself as a peer of the inter-revolutionary generation, united with them not only by time or space, but by the problem of navigating a Soviet past they did not experience but that remains a part of their lives and symbolic economies. Zychowicz writes: 'Each of us has found ourselves at a crossroads with no signposts' (p. 3). Superfluous Women represents an innovative work which illuminates the multiple crossroads that inhabitants and scholars of the post-Communist political, aesthetic and physical landscape must confront. These intersecting pathways are illustrated [End Page 171] with apt theoretical, analytical and primary source materials, accompanied by thorough visual examples. Superfluous Women is as much about Ukraine as it is about protest. While many of the questions posed in the text's introduction are those broadly associated with the study of protest (the commodification of protest, the instantiation of a public, the intersection of feminism and nationalism, and the degree to which art and activism are connected), these questions are always couched in the local context of Ukraine, Kyiv or Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Throughout Superfluous Women, Zychowicz examines the public square (Maidan) as both a physical landscape that enables protest, and the abstract potential public to whom it gives voice. The public square represents continuity not just between the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan, but between all the groups and individuals under discussion. Who occupies Zychowicz's 'square'? The first two chapters are dedicated to the best-known and most controversial feminist group since Ukraine's independence, Femen (2008–13). Of these chapters, the first dissects Femen's topless protests as a parodic strategy critiquing the fetishization of individuality on the Eastern front. Zychowicz stresses the dangers of parody, and her second chapter exposes the realization of these anxieties, detailing Femen's aesthetic shift into a problematic portrayal of Islam. In this chapter, Zychowicz also provides crucial insight into the relationship between protest and commodification by examining the exchanges between Femen and Pussy Riot, which have, so far, largely been neglected by scholars. In her third chapter, Zychowicz turns to the largest Ukrainian feminist group since 1991, Ofenzywa (2009–14), giving a close reading of the visual strategies of the affiliated artist Yevgenia Belorusets. Zychowicz compares Belorusets's photography with that of the Soviet Avant-Garde pioneer, Aleksandr Rodchenko, examining how the shift between a Soviet belief in the capacity of space to create political subjectivity and the impetus for post-Communist subjectivities to mould old Soviet space is articulated aesthetically. The problems and possibilities posed by the Soviet past are explored further in the fourth chapter's discussion of HudRada and REP. Here, Zychowicz emphasizes that unofficial Ukrainian art is more than a third Avant-Garde, by concentrating on the fetishization of the public square as a manifestation of freedom as negative space. The final chapter concerns contemporary artists such as Vlad Ralko and Alevtyna Kakhidze, who appropriate the Soviet aesthetic legacy and symbolic...

The Trouble with Queer Celebrity: Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova)'s A Year of Life in St Petersburg (1838)

Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy (The Notes of the Cavalry Maiden) by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (1783–1866), who left his life as Nadezhda Durova to serve in the Russian army during the Napoleonic wars, brought its author fame upon publication in 1836. This article discusses Aleksandrov's later God zhizni v Peterburge, ili nevygody tretʹego poseshchenia (A Year of Life in St Petersburg, 1838) as an account of early nineteenth-century Russian queer celebrity. How did Aleksandrov's experience compare with other gendered celebrity practices, such as lionization? How was it narrated in literary texts? How did this public representation map onto private discourses of the queer self?

Stjepan Radić and Nikola Pašić as Heralds of Liberal Democracy in Croatia and Serbia: Historiographical Myths and Reality

Historians from the former Yugoslav republics traditionally participate in ongoing political discussions about the ways in which their homelands should progress. Referring to their knowledge of the past, scholars indicate certain historic phenomena and time periods that should serve as ideal models that should be “reproduced” by modern societies in the near future. With regard to the Serbian historiography, the late Belgrade professor Miroslav Jovanović detected several “restoration ideas,” the implementation of which, according to their adherents, would allow modern society to “revise the mistakes of history.” In today’s Serbia and Croatia, certain historical figures, with real and imaginary virtues, are presented as role models and heralds of everything progressive in the field of politics and state building. In particular, in the works of many authors, Nikola Pašić, the head of the Serbian People’s Radical Party (PRP), and Stjepan Radić, the chairman of the Croatian (Republican) Peasant Party (C(R)PP), appear as the “founding fathers” of liberal democratic traditions in the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth. The “golden era of Serbian parliamentarism” (1903–1914), which was characterized by the dominance of the PRP and the virtual “Croatian Neutral Peasant Republic,” a program that allowed the C(R)PP to consolidate the Croatian people in the 1920s, are worthy candidates of “restoration.” In this article, I consider whether there is any substantial historical truth to these images. I conclude that neither the PRP nor the C(R)PP (and neither Pašić nor Radić) espoused liberalist tendencies, which would have favored individualist ethics and respect for the rights of minorities. Both leaders and their parties adhered to the principle of majority dominance and were intolerant of anyone who did not belong to this majority, whether for ethnic, social, or other reasons. The PRP and C(R)PP could be described as the patterns of the same socio-political phenomenon, separated by several decades. They shared and made use of common ideological roots, social bases, organizational structures, self-perceptions among the leadership, slogans, and other strategies and tools of mass manipulation. These factors and also the influence of the nineteenth-century Russian narodnik movement on both parties during their formative periods make them typologically more related to the Russian Bolsheviks than they ever were to Western liberal trends.

Realism as a Perpetual Challenge. Review of: Weisman, M., Vdovin, A., Klieger, I., & Ospovat, K. (Eds.). (2020). Russkii realizm XIX veka. Obshchestvo, znanie, povestvovanie [Russian Realism of the 19th Century. Society, Knowledge, Narrative]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. 568 p.

This text responds to the conceptualisation of nineteenth-century Russian realism presented in separate chapters of the monograph Russian Realism of the 19th Century. Society, Knowledge, Narrative. The review examines the objectives set in the introductory article of the collection and their development in specific studies. The review evaluates the tendency to actualise the work done so far in understanding the concept of “realism”, to pay attention to it again, and combine the views of Russian researchers with the works of foreign scholars. The authors of individual articles of the collection manage to direct their attention to the chosen aspects of studying not only of specific literary works of realist writers of the nineteenth century, but also to those factors external to their creative activities which in many respects determined the themes, subjects, and value orientation of their works. The review also points out that, while comprehending some specific features and specific literary works, and realism as a universal phenomenon, the authors often pay attention to rather private issues. Assessing the work done and the tendency to compare the works of Russian writers with Western ones, it is stated that the authors of individual chapters are not always able to summarise the results of the research and point out exactly what is universal in realism, and what is typical of the Russian realism of the nineteenth century.