Volume 67, Issue 2
Summer 2023
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Kit Pribble: Between Earth and Heaven: Lermontov, Byron, and Romantic Gnosticism
One of the early redactions of Mikhail Lermontov’s Demon (1829–1839) took its epigraph from Lord Byron’s metaphysical drama Cain (1821). Although Lermontov removed the epigraph in subsequent redactions, its presence in the third redaction (1831) suggests the powerful influence that Byron’s gnostic temptation narrative exerted over Lermontov’s own story of demonic rebellion. This article reads Demon through the textological lens of its eight redactions, arguing that the poema’s composition was largely shaped by Lermontov’s attempts to confront and work against the dualist cosmogony that he at first adopted unproblematically from Byron. Two major shifts in the narrative allow the mature, “Caucasian” redactions of Demon to evade the tragic dualism of the early, Byronic drafts: first, the increasing agency of the Georgian princess Tamara as both a fully formed subject and a metonymic stand-in for the Caucasian landscape; and second, the synthesis of the initially split subjectivity of the self-distancing Byronic poet and his hero into a single figure. Ultimately, Lermontov manages to evade the temptation of Cain’s dualism by imbuing the Demon with a poetic sensitivity to the beautiful, an aesthetic category which transcends the materiality/ideality split. In the process, Demon becomes a key to Lermontov’s poetic laboratory, offering direct insight into Lermontov’s evolving vision of Romantic subjectivity.
Kit Pribble is an Assistant Professor of Russian at Wake Forest University. Her work examines late Russian Romantic texts through the lens of interarts theory, identifying points of convergence and reciprocal influence between the literary, visual, and dramatic arts. She also specializes in second language acquisition with a focus on digital pedagogy.
Colleen McQuillen: The Imperial Underground: Coal Mining Narratives of Donbas at the Fin de Siècle
This article examines narratives of coal mining written in the 1890s by Aleksandr Serafimovich and Aleksandr Kuprin that illuminate the temporal and existential disorientation accompanying the decade’s flourishing study of deep earth geology and its practical applications in the exploitative extraction of resources that propelled industrialization and Russia’s modernization. These coal mining narratives elaborate a unique paradox that emerged from the clash of time’s arrow pointing both to the future and the inscrutably deep past: public sentiments of awe and excitement about scientific and industrial progress (conjoined with temporal futurity) clashed with the writers’ and their characters’ horror of coming face to face with the material record of unfathomably vast geological time (time past) and their feelings of alienation. The article highlights how the Russian imperial project of colonizing the resource-rich underground in today’s Ukraine was a form of vertically expanding empire into the geological depths, and how the writers documenting it unwittingly acted as colonial agents by facilitating their Russophone readership’s assimilation of imperial territory into their mental maps. The sketches and works of fiction examined here typically fall under the rubric of neo-realism, but the article suggests that they feature radically altered perceptions of temporal and spatial reality, which unites them with the experimental representational strategies of literary modernism.
Colleen McQuillen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. Her current book project examines Russian literature representing the exploitation of natural resources at the fin de siècle and the countervailing discourses of modernization and the unmaking of modernity that resulted.
Cassio de Oliveira: Writing Outside the Soviet Canon: Aleksandr Kozachinskii’s “The Green Wagon” as Roman à clef and Odesa Memoir
This essay analyzes Aleksandr Kozachinskii’s 1938 Russian-language novella “The Green Wagon” as a roman à clef and exemplar of the Odesa Myth that has been unjustly neglected in literary scholarship. Reasons for the neglect of “The Green Wagon” include the historical context of its publication, between the Great Purges of 1936–1938 and the outbreak of World War II; Kozachinskii’s untimely death; and the conventional interpretation of the novella that reduces it to a fictionalized account of Kozachinskii’s friendship with Evgenii Petrov in Odesa during the early Soviet period. Against such a reductionist reading, and on the basis of recent archival-based scholarship on Kozachinskii’s biography, I argue that “The Green Wagon” should instead be understood as a double memoir, disguised as a roman à clef, of distinct episodes of Kozachinskii’s past as both criminal element and police investigator. The essay explores the ways in which Kozachinskii simultaneously discloses and conceals the memoiristic character of his text against the background of Stalin-era practices of self-fashioning and police-supervised confessions during the time of the Great Purges.
Cassio de Oliveira is Associate Professor of Russian and associate chair of the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University. His research focuses on two core subjects: interwar Soviet culture and literature, and translation in the Russian context. De Oliveira’s first book is entitled Writing Rogues: The Soviet Picaresque and Identity Formation, 1921–1938 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023).
Dominick Lawton Apartment Questions: Mikhail Bulgakov’s Literary Kommunalka,From Theme to Form
The Soviet communal apartment or kommunalka is a widely studied topos, yet what marks did this unique spatial, social, and residential configuration leave on literary form? Joost van Baak has claimed that the kommunalka was both “the most characteristic and poignant image of urban life” in the USSR, “but at the same time [...] the most elusive as a setting.” Against the grain of that assertion, this paper interprets the impact of the kommunalka on Mikhail Bulgakov's writings, beginning with his 1920s feuilletons and his NEP farce Zoika's Apartment and focusing most extensively on his magnum opus The Master and Margarita. Drawing on theories of space that include Bakhtin's chronotope and Alex Woloch's theory of "character-space," I argue that Bulgakov incorporates the kommunalka more and more intimately into his work, until it becomes the underlying structural principle of the Moscow sections of Part One of his most famous novel. The effects of this literary assimilation of the communal apartment include crowding and a fight for space, antagonism and conflict, queues, accidents, the interpenetration of intimate and public spheres, horizontal surveillance by one’s peers, and vertical control by the authorities—as well as more properly formal concerns like the novel’s character system, chapter divisions, and approach to intertextuality. The literarization of the kommunalka in Bulgakov's work offers a new perspective on how the novelties of Soviet byt (often, as in this case, unwelcome) were incorporated into literature, not merely as fictionalized realia or indexes of the moment, but as generators of formal and narrative innovation.
Dominick Lawton is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. His current book project explores the poetics of material objects in early twentieth century Russian literature. He is also working on a study of housing as a cul- tural force in the (former) Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
Elena Baraban: Depicting Ukraine under Nazi Occupation: Igor' Savchenko’s Film Partisans in the Steppes of Ukraine (1943)
The focus of this article is Igor' Savchenko’s Partisans in the Steppes of Ukraine (Partizany v stepiakh Ukrainy, 1943), the first full-length feature film produced by the Kiev Film Studio entirely during the Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany. Drawing on memory studies, post-colonial theory, and theory of deconstruction, the article discusses the artistic means that Savchenko used to integrate Ukraine’s experience of the war into the Soviet discourse of wartime valor, unity, and stoicism, and thus deliver a patriotic message about Soviet nations that fight together against the invaders. Barely mentioned in scholarship, this film is pivotal for understanding representations of Ukraine in Soviet depictions of the war. Savchenko constructs Ukraine’s response to the war effort by making use of the aesthetic strategies found in prewar representations of friendship between Ukrainians and Russians, propaganda posters of 1941, and first wartime short films. While making use of tropes of a big family as well as Biblical imagery, and elements of folk culture, Savchenko depicts Ukraine’s war experience as part of the Soviet one and proposes a hierarchy of Ukrainian and Soviet components in representing the war. The evocations of Soviet leaders frame the references to Ukrainian national heroes. Thus, the fathers-and-sons metaphor acquires here a new twist, with the fathers represented by the leaders of the Soviet state and the sons envisioned as Ukrainian patriots. The study of Savchenko’s film contributes to our understanding of the debates about Soviet-era and present-day collective memory about the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) in Ukraine and Russia. With the discourse about the biggest Soviet nations’ familial unity now shattered, it is important to consider how the idea of brotherhood between Ukraine and other Soviet nations was expressed in Soviet wartime cinema.
Elena Baraban is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manitoba. Her publications include two co-edited volumes: The Akunin Project: The Mysteries and Histories of Russia’s Best-Selling Author (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and Fighting Words and Images: Representing War across the Disciplines (University of Toronto Press, 2012), as well as articles on detective fiction, animation, films about WWII and the October Revolution.
Dylan Ogden: Repeating Repetition: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Vasily Aksenov, Andrei Bitov, and the Nouveau Roman in Russia
This article analyzes the use of narrative repetition in Vasilii Aksenov’s The Burn (1975) and Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House (1987) as an intertextual strategy that borrows from and engages in dialogue with the prose of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a twentieth-century author and prominent representative of the French “nouveau roman.” Drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s theorizing of difference and repetition, I argue that, far from engaging in rote imitation of Robbe-Grillet, these two novels use repetition—both as a specific narrative device linked to the nouveau roman, and as a broader approach to literary creation—to chart a new direction for Russian literature capable of revealing and undermining the empty abstractions of late-Soviet culture. At the same time, neither novel can easily be considered a straightforward continuation of Robbe-Grillet’s literary project, as they each diverge stylistically from the aesthetics of the nouveau roman and re-introduce questions of politics and humanist ethics that Robbe-Grillet’s fiction seeks to avoid. On a broader level, these two novels can help to better understand the understudied role that the nouveau roman played in late-Soviet literary discourse about realism and the genre of the novel.
Dylan Ogden is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His research interests include literary reception, theories of intertextuality and influence, and intercultural connections between twentieth-century French and Russian literary cultures. Currently, he is writing his dissertation on the reception and influence of the French nouveau roman in the Soviet Union.
ILYA KUKULIN: Review of Past Discontinuous: Fragments of Restoration by
Irina Sandomirskaja.
Robert Leach. Sergei Tretyakov: A Revolutionary Writer in Stalin’s Russia. (Jesse Gardiner)
José Vergara. All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. (Julia Vaingurt)
Katherine Bowers. Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic. (Barry P. Scherr)
Alyssa DeBlasio and Izolda Savenkova. Pro-dvizhenie: Advanced Russian through Film and
Media. (Evgeny Dengub)
Nikolai Evreinov. The Steps of Nemesis: A Dramatic Chronicle in Six Scenes from Party Life in
the USSR (1936–1938). (Alisa Ballard Lin)
John Freedman, editor. A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: 20 Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights. (Noah Birksted-Breen)
Andrea Lanoux, Kelly Herold, Olga Bukhina. Growing Out of Communism: Russian
Literature for Children and Teens, 1991–2017. (Ainsley Morse)
Mark G. Pomar Cold War Radio. The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America
and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (Michael Launer and Marilyn Young)
Gary Saul Morson. Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless
Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. (Thomas Seifrid)
Javier Sethness Castro. Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography. (Jillian Porter)