This article argues that, in the Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790) and across his broader œuvre, eighteenth-century Russia’s most sophisticated thinker, Aleksandr Radishchev, formulates a major reinterpretation of Jesus Christ. Participating in the broad Enlightenment effort to reimagine religious belief generally and Christianity’s central figure more specifically, Radishchev places a new understanding of Christ at the heart of his moral philosophy. He identifies Jesus’s teaching of compassionate love for others as the foundation of all virtue, opposing it to both Old Testament legalism and Russian positive law. However, he locates this true voice of divinity not in revelation or human institutions, but in the individual conscience as a universal impulse that each person must choose to follow. Radishchev’s Jesus thereby becomes not the incarnate Son, but the prophet of moral autonomy who invites every human being to become God-like in ethical judgment and intellectual accomplishment. Radishchev nevertheless eschews the stereotypical Enlightenment insistence on Jesus’s humanity by updating the Orthodox idea of theosis or unification with the deity: he retains Christ the Logos as the underlying structure of the universe, in which humans participate through their intellectual and moral pursuits. Yet Radishchev’s perhaps most original contribution to Enlightenment Christology lies in his focus on form: his Christ’s human and divine natures fade away to become literary devices, furnishing patterns of characterization and conceptualization that affirm the power of literature to express philosophical truths inaccessible to institutionalized, dogmatic religion. In dialogue with the work of numerous Enlightenment thinkers, Radishchev’s moral and literary Christ also paves the way for nineteenth-century Russia’s novelistic rewritings of Jesus for the modern era.

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. She is the author of The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2019), and she co-translated and co-edited with Andrew Kahn the Selected Letters of Catherine the Great (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her work on biblical reception in eighteenth-century Russia has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries

Some of the earliest and best translations of Aleksandr Pushkin’s poetry into German and into French are the work of one and the same person—the trilingual poet Karolina Pavlova (1807–1893). Her translations of Pushkin from the 1830s have been called unsurpassed by several twentieth-century scholars, who expressed regret that these translations were unfairly forgotten by posterity. Adopting a theoretical framework based in feminist translation studies, this article proposes an analysis of Pavlova’s “German Pushkin” and “French Pushkin” by looking at her translations of the poems “Prorok” and “Ekho” into German and “Polkovodets” into French. All three poems explore the role and mission of the poet in society. Translating these texts at a time when she had not yet published any Russian poetry of her own allowed Pavlova to reflect on her budding literary career in dialogue with an author who had already gained recognition as the foremost Russian poet. More specifically, the translations shed light on Pavlova’s own precarious status as a woman poet in a man’s world and as an author of perceived foreign origin struggling to gain recognition in an era of nascent Russian nationalism.

Adrian Wanner is Distinguished Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. His academic interests include modernist poetry, translingual fiction, and literary multilingualism and translation studies. He is the author of four monographs, most recently The Bilingual Muse: Self-Translation among Russian Poets (Northwestern University Press, 2020). In addition, he has published six editions of Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian poetry of his own translations into German verse.

The 1891–92 Russian famine prompted the emergence of numerous private charitable initiatives, often inspired by depictions of the crisis. To analyze the effectiveness of these texts, I apply the literary-critical concept of the “humanitarian narrative,” coined by Thomas Laqueur, and show that the depictions of this famine mainly demonstrate its main features. However, the most prominent and enduring text of this crisis, Vladimir Korolenko’s memoir In the Year of Famine, breaks one of the main conventions of the humanitarian narrative. Instead of offering an effective model for assistance, it asserts the narrator’s powerlessness to ameliorate the situation. This narrative strategy, I argue, signals to readers that charity alone cannot address the under- lying causes of the crisis, thus situating the text within the realm of developmental humanitarianism and human rights discourse. My analysis contributes to the discussion of the nineteenth-century humanitarian narratives in Laqueur (as well as Luc Boltanski) by drawing attention to features that can arise in texts created under constrained political conditions, where a direct appeal for civic action that goes beyond mere charity could be perceived as dangerous and revolutionary. At the same time, from the perspective of transnational humanitarianism, such a narratological move addresses a common issue of humanitarian narratives—it prevents readers from becoming complacent and urges them not only to sympathize but to act. I present Korolenko’s case as an example of a tradition alternative to one analyzed by Laqueur, wherein the narrator expresses impotence in the face of suffering that cannot be remedied by charity alone. This self-critical discourse, existing from the eighteenth century to the present day, underscores the limitations of humanitarianism and invites the discussion of more radical solutions.

Olga Ovcharskaia received her degree from Moscow State University and is currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University, where she is completing her dissertation, The Famine Years: Literature and Humanitarianism in Late Imperial Russia. Her research interests include media studies, the literature and history of late Imperial Russia, and the interactions between literary and non-literary institutions in the Russian Empire.

The paper analyzes Argutinskaia’s novel Ognennyi put' (The Fiery Path, 1932). The significance of this text lies in its autobiographical heroine, a participant in the Russian Civil War, and its focus on the issues faced by women at the front, which is rel- atively uncommon in the literature on this war. Utilizing feminist literary studies and traditional philological analysis, the research explores how Argutinskaia’s narrative liberates women from restrictive gender roles and empowers them to construct new identities. A number of different military femininities are presented in the novel: the “female masculinity” of a woman soldier, the military femininity of a young girl soldier, and the expanded femininity of the Red nurses. As a participant in this civil war, the author opts for the genre of the autobiographical novel rather than the traditional autobiography. This choice can be attributed to the hardships she experienced and the lack of available models on which to base such an unconventional experience. The novel centers on the heroine’s reflection on the breakdown of the usual foundations of society. While in this respect Argutinskaia’s work is close to the literature of the 1920s and 1930s that depicts a typical intellectual who joined the revolution, the feminine gender of her protagonist provides an unusual perspective. The issue of gender-based violence in warfare, as depicted in the novel, is emphasized in this article. By situating the work within the broader literary context of its time, this article aims to shed light on the significance of women’s military narratives and the need for their recog- nition in literary discourse.

Olga Simonova PHD, is a Collegium researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies and the School of History, Culture and Art Studies at the University of Turku in Finland. She is the author of eighty academic publications and specializes in Russian lit- erature of the early twentieth century and gender studies. Her research interests include mass literature, women’s magazines, representations of women in literature about the First World War and the Russian Civil War, and children’s literature during the Stalinist period.

Vladimir Nabokov describes the superficially unrelated pieces “Ultima Thule” and “Solus Rex,” published in the early 1940s, as the first two chapters of an “unfinished thing,” of which only fragments and “a few notes” remain. Critics have attempted to collate unpublished material from the same period in order to speculate as to this unrealized novel. Persistent themes of miscarriage and this and other contemporary texts, however, suggest that they are intentionally unfinished fragments allegorizing the potential body of Russian-language work that Nabokov’s switch to English pre- vented him from bringing to term. They are akin to evident literary pranks such as the works associated with Nabokov’s pseudonym Vasilii Shishkov as well as to Nabokov’s efforts to continue Pushkin’s unfinished verse drama “Rusalka” and his own The Gift. Interlocking images of unfinishedness populate these texts: a poem that cannot be read because its author has gone to America, leaving behind an indecipherable text in an obscure language, as in “Ultima Thule”; the death of a pregnant woman, which figures in “Ultima Thule” as in Pushkin’s “Rusalka”; the general theme of inchoate adolescence and sexual immaturity. Metafictional moments that press upon the reader strategies of reading through juxtaposition further suggest that these texts are, like Romantic fragments, intentionally unfinished.

Jacob Emery is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. He is the author of Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (2017) and The Vortex That Unites Us: Versions of Totality in Russian Literature (2023), as well as the novel A Clockwork River (2022), co-written with his sister under the name J. S. Emery.

Reviews and critical treatments of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Uchenik (The Student, 2016) have uniformly focused on the radical Christian fundamentalism of the film’s hero, Venia Iuzhin. What is left cryptically unexplained by the film and entirely unaddressed by critics and what is at the center of the present analysis is the possible motivation behind Venia’s sudden religious extremism. From the moment Venia declares that swim class violates his religious sensibilities, no one—not his mother, his classmates, his teachers or even critics of the movie—ever questions the reason for his sudden and fanatical conversion. Serebrennikov’s omission of a reason for Venia’s conversion suggests that the film’s central focus—and the reason for Venia’s conver- sion—may actually lie not in religion but in what religion seeks most to regulate and control: human sexuality and, in the case of Serebrennikov’s film, especially queer sexuality. In my reading, Uchenik gives viewers solid grounds for viewing Venia’s religious fanaticism as a form of male hysteria masked as religious conviction and projected onto queer bodies. Homoeroticism and homophobia emerge as much more significant themes in Serebrennikov’s movie than Mayenburg’s play and change how we ultimately understand both the director’s themes and his cinematic method.

John Givens is Professor of Russian at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Prodigal Son: Vasily Shukshin in Soviet Russian Culture (2000) and The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (2018). He is former editor of Russian Studies in Literature (1999–2016), and co-translator of Vasily Shukshin, Stories from a Siberian Village (1996). Givens is currently working on a study titled The Anxiety of Belief in Russian Cinema.