This article introduces the cluster dedicated to Nikolai Nekrasov’s 1854 poem “V derevne” (“In the Village”). It reflects on Nekrasov’s relevance for contemporary readers and identifies the conflicting pull of commitment and alienation in his poetry as an important source of renewed scholarly interest in his work. The introduction announces the special issue’s dual purpose of modeling an open scholarly exchange and making a new dimension of Nekrasov’s work accessible for undergraduate teaching. The article also offers its own close reading, which focuses on the material objects that populate the poem. The author interprets these objects as crucial nexus points where materialism and social critique are reconceived and complicated through the figurative and symbolic labor which characterizes the lyric.

Luba Golburt is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of California Berkeley. She is the author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination (2014) and multiple articles on the history of Russian poetry, Enlightenment, and Romanticism. She currently co-edits The Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry.

The translator’s note addresses formal and thematic difficulties encountered in the process of translating Nikolai Nekrasov’s “V derevne” into English. Characteristically for the poet generally, varieties of speech (including socially-determined and -determining register as well as folkloric elements) are central to the poem and notoriously difficult to translate into a different cultural context. Formal features like rhyme and meter typical of Nekrasov and nineteenth-century Russian poetry more generally are also discussed.

Ainsley Morse teaches in the departments of East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College and translates from Russian, Ukrainian, and the languages of former Yugoslavia. Her co-translation (with Bela Shayevich) of Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2013. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the Soviet period, particularly unofficial or “underground” culture and avant-gardes; her book Word Play discusses the childlike aesthetic shared by Soviet children’s literature and the experimental poets who wrote it.

The essay explores the genre tradition behind N. A. Nekrasov’s poem “In the Village” (1854) and its aesthetic and political underpinnings. Drawing on a centuries-old tradition of depicting rural life in genres such as the descriptive poetry and the idyll, Nekrasov revives and refashions the aesthetic and politics of the descriptive gaze. Originally associated with the posture of gentlemanly leisure contrasted with the peasant toil reduced to an element of the poetic landscape, this gaze reemerges in Nekrasov as a vehicle of radical social compassion and a hidden revolutionary utopia. In this, Nekrasov’s political convictions are interwoven with interpretations of mimesis in aesthetic philosophy from Schiller and Hegel to Belinsky and Apollon Grigoriev.

Kirill Ospovat is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research mainly focuses on Russian literature and culture of the imperial period in comparative and political perspectives, with an emphasis on radical movements and revolutionary imagination. He is currently working on a book on the politics and economies of Russian sentimental fiction from Karamzin to Dostoevsky.

This paper argues that Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem is closely related to a topical discussion on the representation of peasants in literary texts that was unfolding in the criticism of 1850s. Critics such as Pavel Annenkov, who published his articles in The Contemporary edited by Nekrasov, insisted that the modern literature created by the westernized elites was incapable of correctly describing the social and psychological circumstances of the life of common people. His opponent Stepan Dudyshkin, to whom Nekrasov dedicated the first edition of his poem, replied that the whole idea of a perfectly correct representation of human life in a work of art is an illusion created by German philosophers, while a poet should rather influence the reader and evoke strong feelings. Analyzing the poem by Nekrasov, I demonstrate that he closely follows the advice of Dudyshkin, showing that such feelings as pity and sympathy can overcome social and cultural borders between the characters of his poem.

Kirill ZubkovV received his degree at St. Petersburg State University and worked in the Institute of Russian Literature (St. Petersburg) and Higher School of Economics (Moscow). Currently Zubkov is a research fellow at the University of Bologna. His research interests are mostly focused around the literary institutions of the Russian empire, including but not limited to literary criticism, censorship, “thick” journals and theater.

This essay places Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem “V derevne” (“In the Village”) in the context of two other Nekrasov poems that share its peculiar discursive structure, for which I coin the term “frame lyric.” I argue that viewing these three frame lyrics as a sequence reveals a process spanning eighteen years (1845–1863), by which Nekrasov parodied gentry lyric subjectivity, while innovatively developing dialogic subjectivity and lyric form as social categories. This social poetics was newly relevant to the rift between the intelligentsia and the peasantry, of which Nekrasov was acutely conscious, and tended toward an imagined horizon of ideal poetic communion between the two classes, which I term “poetopia.” Crucial to the analysis is the lyric specificity inherent in Nekrasov’s endeavor, which deliberately departed from the prose narrative genres whose emergence dominated the literary scene during this period and which also addressed the social rift.

David Powelstock is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of Becoming Mikhail Lermontov: The Ironies of Romantic Individualism in Nicholas I’s Russia, and articles on Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Bakhtin, among others. His current project is on lyric subjectivity in nineteenth-century Russian poetry.

The folkloric elements in Nikolai Nekrasov’s “V derevne” (“In the Village,” 1854) go beyond metric and stylistic affinities, and include, among others, the crows that f lock as if from around the world; the well, the name Kasyanovna; and the final image of the black net. The paper will describe the dynamics of these elements’ interaction within the text, suggesting that in the poem, the lyric author’s engagement with the two genres of folk poetry, namely, the epic and the lament (plach, prichitanie), brings about a transformative experience for the lyric hero.

Victoria Somoff is Associate Professor of Russian at Dartmouth College. Her research interests include theory and history of the novel; narrative and consciousness; folklore and oral poetics; and Bakhtin studies. She is the author of The Imperative of Reliability: Russian Prose on the Eve of the Novel, 1820s–1850s.

The article proposes an interpretation of Nikolai Nekrasov’s poem “In the Village,” according to which it cannot be considered as a work aimed at social criticism, the protection of the weak and lowly from the strong and noble. In his text, the poet speaks, instead, of the vulnerability and weakness of every human being in the face of nature and the world, and the inevitability of final defeat and death. Thus, Nekrasov defends the right of any person (including himself), regardless of her social status, to complain and be pitied.

Mikhail Makeev holds a Doctor of Philology and is a professor at Moscow State University and leading researcher at the Institute of Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a specialist in Nekrasov’s works and biography. He also studies and teaches the history of Russian literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, the sociology of literature, and problems of literary economics. He is the author of six books and around one hundred articles.

This paper argues that Nikolai Nekrasov’s “V derevne” explores the limits of the Romantic view of lyricism as a socially isolated endeavor and attempts instead to use the lyric form to express social relationships. It contends that the poem works to conceptualize a social whole in which peasant and non-peasant are directly connected. Tragedy emerges as the mode of this connection: the lyric hero of the poem’s first monologue and the lamenting peasant in the poem’s second part each turn inward to bemoan circumstances which they feel they cannot change, including, in the case of the lyric hero, their own individual moods. This is the essence of Nekrasov’s tragic pathos. As a folkloric omen, the poem’s central image of gathering crows introduces a supernatural element to the poem which, rather than distinguishing a space separate from socio-economic realities, renders what might otherwise be considered natural an intentional effect. The poem’s allusions through the crow omen to supernatural forces points to the actual social forces that structure the poem’s world. The mysteriousness of these forces is thematized as a shared alienation, which is experienced even by the peasant in her presumably collective sphere as her mourning becomes a more modern sense of melancholia. Representing a collective experience of shared isolation, the poem attempts to embody the social totality which no single individual can grasp, in this way drawing on tragedy to offer a new form of lyric which does not ignore social divisions but rather expresses them.

Jennifer Flaherty received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from University of California Berkeley. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history. She has published on Gleb Uspensky, Nihilism, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Radishchev. She joined the Slavic and Eurasian Studies Department at Duke in 2023.

“Bachmann” (1924) reflects Vladimir Nabokov’s interest in E. T. A. Hoffmann during his Berlin period, as well as his frequent use of orphic imagery. The story’s protagonist, the composer and piano virtuoso Bachmann, has adopted Romanticism’s notion, specifically as presented in Hoffmann’s works, that a creative genius must dwell in the spheres of the sublime and, especially avoid domesticity and earthly love. If he has a muse, she must be adored from a distance and their love must be entirely spiritual. These notions explain why Bachmann holds his muse, Madame Perov, at a distance, even treating her with apparent contempt. Eventually he yields to his love, but, in an orphic vein, she dies at the very moment that he thinks he has saved her and their love from this, as he now believes, misconception. The story implies questions about the relevance to our times of aesthetic theories from the distant past. Although no conclusions are offered, Nabokov seems to suggest that the sublime and prosaic can be merged through uncompromising devotion to art. Genuine art is sublime enough to include and ennoble the prose of byt. The contribution to Nabokov Studies is to present a close reading of an infrequently discussed text by Nabokov.

Irene Masing-Delic is Professor Emerita (Ohio State University), and currently affiliated with University of North Carolina. She has published on Turgenev and Dostoevskii, the poetry and prose of the “Silver Age” (Blok, Pasternak, Zabolotskii), utopian thought (Abolishing Death, 1992; Russian Uprazdnenie smerti, 2020), and early Soviet writers (Pil'niak, Zoshchenko, Babel', Gor'kii). Nabokov’s Russian prose is a recent interest.