Viacheslav Ivanov is well-known as a Symbolist poet and literary theorist, but relatively little attention has been paid to his activity as a dramatist. Ivanov’s first tragedy, Tantalus (published in 1905), was warmly received by contemporaries like Andrei Bely and Aleksandr Blok, and the author himself considered the play a central work within his oeuvre. It is thus worthy of renewed attention. To that end, this essay analyzes a symbolic gestalt developed within the tragedy that associates agricultural language and the image of the earth with parenthood, divine retribution, and a Dionysian understanding of death and resurrection. This approach sheds new light on many of the tragedy’s more cryptic utterances. It clarifies the motivations of both Tantalus and his son Broteas, who are unwittingly trapped within a mythical cycle of rebellion against their fathers. When considered within the framework of this “foundational myth,” the enigmatic goddess Adrastea’s role as an embodiment of both vengeance and the earth also becomes clearer. Tantalus ultimately emerges as a successful creative embodiment of Ivanov’s early theories of Symbolism and mythopoesis. I conclude by considering the rhetorical and conceptual relationship between Tantalus and Ivanov’s later analyses of the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, arguing that the tragedy both adapts the symbolism of the novelist’s later works and rehearses the concepts found within Ivanov’s subsequent critical intervention.

Gabriel Nussbaum is a graduate student at Princeton University. His research primarily focuses on theories of parody and formal inheritance within the Russian prose tradition, and he has published work on Dostoevsky and Gogol.

As a psychological detective drama, Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment crafts a careful construction of Rodion Raskolnikov’s interiority. The novel’s heavy emphasis on the exploration of the internal world of a criminal’s psyche, however, presents distinct challenges to anyone wishing to adapt it for the screen. How do you translate in cinematic terms the many interior monologues that give us a glimpse of the tortured workings of Raskolnikov’s mind? And what does a director’s answer to this question reveal about the act of film adaptation? To probe these questions, this article explores Lev Kulidzhanov’s and Josef von Sternberg’s film adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel in dialogue with other cinematic treatments of the text. I argue that how a film reproduces the main protagonist’s interiority and whether it is to be “shown” on the screen inevitably reveals the director’s cultural and ideological position on Raskolnikov himself. My discussion argues that domestically produced adaptations of Crime and Punishment tend to emphasize psychological naturalism as a way to prove fidelity to the hypotext and assert its cultural significance, whereas the further a film is from the land of Raskolnikov’s fictional birth, the question of interiority transforms into a thematic vehicle for tracing the contours of aesthetic, political, or philosophical discourses that may be quite remote from those that guided Dostoevsky’s own writing.

Rita Safariants is an Assistant Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages & Cultures at the University of Rochester. Her scholarly interests include Russian film, literature, popular music, and performance culture. She is completing a book project on the role of rock music in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema.

This article analyzes Vladimir Nabokov’s theory of literary evolution and focuses on one pivotal aspect of this theory, namely, the striking notion that writers from different epochs see color “more distinctly” than their predecessors. Since Nabokov articulated his theory in diverse genres related to literary scholarship, the article casts him in the unfamiliar but legitimate role of a literary theorist. Nabokov’s ideas on color description are shown to have developed in reaction to Formalist ideas on literary evolution, refracted through Nabokov’s allies in Russian emigration Iulii Aikhenval'd and Vladislav Khodasevich, and then to have gone in a unique Nabokovian direction. In Nabokov’s theory, progressist evolution co-exists with an ahistorical concept of the individual talent until they clash, and Nabokov allows the latter to triumph over all forms of temporality. The article concludes by addressing where Nabokov’s theory of literary evolution fits in with various interpretive traditions of Nabokov scholarship.

Sara Karpukhin is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests include queer and feminist theory, political uses of history and aesthetics, individual agency in art, and Vladimir Nabokov. She is a co-editor of the volume Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century (Amherst College Press, 2022).

To address the problem of racism in the contemporary post-Soviet region, the literary history of this multiethnic territory should be considered. The novelette The Gypsy and Three Ladies (1924) by Latvian feminist writer Lūcija Zamaič was based on her experiences during the Great War as a refugee in Russia. It places the question of race next to her satirical critique of the bourgeois family, which she saw as similar to prostitution. In the novelette, a young Roma man Kazimir is hired by three married bourgeois ladies (a French, a Russian, and a Latvian) as a gigolo thus forming a “joint stock company” where each of the women has the same share. Kazimir’s race, presented as “unspeakable” for the multiethnic bourgeois world of the agonizing Russian Empire, is what complicates the lady’s plan. As I suggest, Zamaič constructs the identity of her Latvian lady avoiding possible complicated implications of her ethnic and racial background. This helps her to claim her heroine’s stable place in Eurasian modernity while the Roman man serves for an exoticized and Orientalized sex slave who is simultaneously demanded to perform his “authenticity” and obey to demands of the multiethnic Russian bourgeois society. Zamaič’s narrative of conflicting aspects of race, class, ethnicity and gender shows the rapture in the history of the region with its “old” order. It shows a rupture also in its literary traditions with romanticized and exoticized Roma characters in Russian romanticism as well as Roman people as familiar Others in Latvian rural realist fiction of the pre-war era.

Kārlis Vērdiņš is a recent PhD graduate in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. He is a senior researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art at the University of Latvia and an assistant professor at the Art Academy of Latvia. He is the author of The Social and Political Dimensions of the Latvian Prose Poem (2010) and the co-editor of Queer Stories of Europe (2016).

This paper examines the Russian television series Dekabristka, a biopic based on the true story of Zinaida Levitskaia, who falsified court reports to release 410 prisoners from Gulag labor camps. By employing melodramatic devices of Manicheanism and patriarchal gender norms, the series succeeds in creating an affective safe space for broad audiences to revisit past national traumas. At the same time, it participates in the larger practice of films and television series set in the World War II-era that has dominated Russia’s mediascape since the early 2000s. Continuing these films’ motifs of unproblematized heroes and a return to conservative values, Dekabristkauses already familiar cultural norms and succeeds in bringing new perspectives into the national narrative.

Natalie McCauley is a visiting Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Richmond. Her research focuses on the role of gender in Russia’s national narrative. Analyzing screen media, she explores the increased return of patriarchy in dominant culture, such as through contemporary depictions of the WWII-era, and how such images work to help the Kremlin’s increasingly imperialistic aims.

This paper concerns Dostoevskii memorialization in the context of Leningrad/St. Petersburg, as the city began to reconstruct its cultural landscapes and local identities in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Regarded as a Petersburg writer by virtue of his significant contribution to the city image, Dostoevskii occupies a prominent position in the city’s cultural landscapes. Dostoevskii memorial sites stand out as examples of Petersburg’s efforts to recuperate its local heritage, taking back its primary right to commemorate him from Moscow. The Dostoevskii memorial museum serves as an epicenter of his memorialization: by narrating the simultaneous sacredness and everydayness of the writer and the memorial sites, the museum posits itself between church and market. The emphasis on everydayness that persists beyond the museum walls epitomizes the uniqueness of Dostoevskii memorialization. The walking tour that connects his memorial site exemplifies how visitors or flâneurs intertwine the hyper-textual city with extant space in their reimagination of his work, constructing a com- bined historical experience of the nineteenth-century city and twenty-first century everyday urban stroll. Therefore, Dostoevskii memorialization serves as a powerful cultural activity in Petersburg, making the hypertextual and historic city visible and tangible in everyday landscapes and sustaining the city’s identity.

Kiun Hwang is a Research Professor at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, Hanyang University with a Ph.D. in Slavic literatures and languages from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the intersection of contemporary Russian culture, urban studies, and memory studies, specifically in the context of the built environment.