Panel 2: Theoretical Approaches to the
Russian Nineteenth Century
Lyric Subjectivity and the Circulation of Feeling in Elegies by Zhukovsky
Alyson Tapp, Clare College, Cambridge
The Russian elegy significantly broadened and deepened the representation of interiority. As Classicism ceded to Romanticism, the elegy became less a “vers d’occasion,” reflecting on a single instance of life’s lost harmonious order, and opened into existential scrutiny of the lyrical subject’s emotional experience. Emotional states were no longer represented as whole and singular; they were increasingly understood as mixed, irreducible to a single essence, and, consequently, dynamic: a feeling in motion, unfolding in time and circulating between subjects.
Focusing on the articulation of hope in elegies by Vasily Zhukovsky, this paper will discuss how Zhukovsky’s lyric imagines ways in which feeling moves between persons. In particular, it will consider the role of sound in the transmission of feeling in the elegy.
The discussion is part of a larger project which explores the relationship between lyric and novelistic subjectivity in the Russian nineteenth century. At the very beginning of the compressed period of the development of the Russian novel, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Zhukovsky’s work provided one conduit for ideas about selfhood and consciousness from German pre-Romanticism and English empiricist philosophy to enter Russian literary culture.
Love as a Moral Category in Russian Literature
Olga Tabachnikova, University of Bath
Rooted in both pagan and Christian mythologies, Russian idea of love permeates the whole of Russian cultural history and contributes to the famous ‘cursed questions’, inseparable from the meaning of life itself. As Joseph Brodsky aptly put it, ‘Love is the most elitist of passions. Only in the context of culture it gains dimension and vista…’.[1] Yet, while treated in depth in Russian poetry and prose throughout the 19th century, it became a subject of scholarly research only in the 20th, but even then the studies were by no means comprehensive. Thus, while explored extensively from a gender studies perspective or sexuality angle, no substantial research exists which would explore the concept of love in the Russian literary-philosophical context in correlation with paradigmatic shifts in moral, ethical and spiritual values. This is particularly surprising, given that within Russian literary-philosophical tradition, personal love is intrinsically connected to a wider concept of devotion to ‘Mother Russia’, the Russian-Orthodox ideas of compassion, mercy, justice, self-sacrifice and self-denial, as well as the demonic agonies of pride, vanity, ‘spiritual lust’ and master-slave relationships.
The proposed paper traces an evolution of the concept of love in Russia in the context of moral values. Drawing on Russian literary material of the 19th century (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov), it explores the shifts in the cultural paradigm, and attempts to inscribe these in a wider literary-philosophical context.
[1] Joseph Brodsky, ‘Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899-1980). Nekrolog’ (Obituary) in Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, 1997, vol. 5, p. 113, translation is mine.
Topos or ‘Text’?: The Caucasian Spa in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature
Benjamin Morgan, UCL-SSEES
The Caucasian spa resort is a significant setting in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. This paper will trace the origins and evolution of Russian writing about watering places like Piatigorsk and Kislovodsk from romanticism until the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time it will consider the semiotic theories of Iurii Lotman’s Tartu-Moscow School and the ‘transtextual’ apparatus of the French narratologist Gérard Genette as ‘toolboxes’ for work on place in narrative. Do recent theories of textuality offer the best means of critical approach to representations of resort culture – or is the southern spa better framed as a topos or cultural ‘common-place’? What tropes and motifs unite Russian literary representations of watering-place life and how did the way resorts were depicted change over time? I structure my diachronic survey by reference to three representative works of fiction, all of them set at the spa: ‘Vecher na kavkazskikh vodakh v 1824 godu’ (1830), by the Decembrist Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii’s; Aleksandr Druzhinin’s story ‘Russkii cherkes’ (1855); and Lidiia Veselitskaia’s Mimochka na vodakh (1891). My paper will also offer a comparative perspective on Russian literature’s Caucasian watering-place text/topos, attempting to situate it with respect to both Russian writing about foreign resort culture (e.g. Dostoevskii’s The Gambler (1867)) and British and American writing on spa culture from the same period.
Interfering with theory: 19th century metafiction
Margarita Vaysman, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford
There is a widespread assumption that since theory of metafiction has developed as a response to modernist discourse, it cannot be applied to works of literature chronologically preceding modern narrative practices (P. Waugh, 1984). When analysing Don-Quixote and Tristam Shandy as metafiction, are we imposing 20th century philosophical queries on the autonomous texts or are we uncovering new meanings? In relation to Russian literature, this conflict of material vs. methodology is intensified by the absence in Russian of a relevant literary term/definition for this phenomenon (with the exception of M. Lipovetsky’s recently suggested metaproza). This problem can be conceptualised in G. Tihanov’s terms of ‘re-forming literature’ and ‘regimes of relevance’: can we use theory created during one regime of relevance to analyse the works originating from another? How productive would this analysis be?
My presentation would address this problem on the material of my research project, which explores late 19th century Russian political novels. Self-consciously ideological, these novelistic narratives also reflect and express their authors’ awareness of literary conventions. The combination of two self-consiousnesses, ideological and narrative, results in a certain type of novelistic form that I describe and define as a specific sub-genre. I would focus on the role theoretical models play in shaping methodological approach to literary texts, providing examples of how easily literary texts, especially those with a political agenda, can be misinterpreted and how important it is to be aware of the general philosophical and historical framework in which literary theories originate.
Alyson Tapp, Clare College, Cambridge
The Russian elegy significantly broadened and deepened the representation of interiority. As Classicism ceded to Romanticism, the elegy became less a “vers d’occasion,” reflecting on a single instance of life’s lost harmonious order, and opened into existential scrutiny of the lyrical subject’s emotional experience. Emotional states were no longer represented as whole and singular; they were increasingly understood as mixed, irreducible to a single essence, and, consequently, dynamic: a feeling in motion, unfolding in time and circulating between subjects.
Focusing on the articulation of hope in elegies by Vasily Zhukovsky, this paper will discuss how Zhukovsky’s lyric imagines ways in which feeling moves between persons. In particular, it will consider the role of sound in the transmission of feeling in the elegy.
The discussion is part of a larger project which explores the relationship between lyric and novelistic subjectivity in the Russian nineteenth century. At the very beginning of the compressed period of the development of the Russian novel, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Zhukovsky’s work provided one conduit for ideas about selfhood and consciousness from German pre-Romanticism and English empiricist philosophy to enter Russian literary culture.
Love as a Moral Category in Russian Literature
Olga Tabachnikova, University of Bath
Rooted in both pagan and Christian mythologies, Russian idea of love permeates the whole of Russian cultural history and contributes to the famous ‘cursed questions’, inseparable from the meaning of life itself. As Joseph Brodsky aptly put it, ‘Love is the most elitist of passions. Only in the context of culture it gains dimension and vista…’.[1] Yet, while treated in depth in Russian poetry and prose throughout the 19th century, it became a subject of scholarly research only in the 20th, but even then the studies were by no means comprehensive. Thus, while explored extensively from a gender studies perspective or sexuality angle, no substantial research exists which would explore the concept of love in the Russian literary-philosophical context in correlation with paradigmatic shifts in moral, ethical and spiritual values. This is particularly surprising, given that within Russian literary-philosophical tradition, personal love is intrinsically connected to a wider concept of devotion to ‘Mother Russia’, the Russian-Orthodox ideas of compassion, mercy, justice, self-sacrifice and self-denial, as well as the demonic agonies of pride, vanity, ‘spiritual lust’ and master-slave relationships.
The proposed paper traces an evolution of the concept of love in Russia in the context of moral values. Drawing on Russian literary material of the 19th century (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov), it explores the shifts in the cultural paradigm, and attempts to inscribe these in a wider literary-philosophical context.
[1] Joseph Brodsky, ‘Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899-1980). Nekrolog’ (Obituary) in Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, 1997, vol. 5, p. 113, translation is mine.
Topos or ‘Text’?: The Caucasian Spa in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature
Benjamin Morgan, UCL-SSEES
The Caucasian spa resort is a significant setting in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. This paper will trace the origins and evolution of Russian writing about watering places like Piatigorsk and Kislovodsk from romanticism until the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time it will consider the semiotic theories of Iurii Lotman’s Tartu-Moscow School and the ‘transtextual’ apparatus of the French narratologist Gérard Genette as ‘toolboxes’ for work on place in narrative. Do recent theories of textuality offer the best means of critical approach to representations of resort culture – or is the southern spa better framed as a topos or cultural ‘common-place’? What tropes and motifs unite Russian literary representations of watering-place life and how did the way resorts were depicted change over time? I structure my diachronic survey by reference to three representative works of fiction, all of them set at the spa: ‘Vecher na kavkazskikh vodakh v 1824 godu’ (1830), by the Decembrist Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii’s; Aleksandr Druzhinin’s story ‘Russkii cherkes’ (1855); and Lidiia Veselitskaia’s Mimochka na vodakh (1891). My paper will also offer a comparative perspective on Russian literature’s Caucasian watering-place text/topos, attempting to situate it with respect to both Russian writing about foreign resort culture (e.g. Dostoevskii’s The Gambler (1867)) and British and American writing on spa culture from the same period.
Interfering with theory: 19th century metafiction
Margarita Vaysman, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford
There is a widespread assumption that since theory of metafiction has developed as a response to modernist discourse, it cannot be applied to works of literature chronologically preceding modern narrative practices (P. Waugh, 1984). When analysing Don-Quixote and Tristam Shandy as metafiction, are we imposing 20th century philosophical queries on the autonomous texts or are we uncovering new meanings? In relation to Russian literature, this conflict of material vs. methodology is intensified by the absence in Russian of a relevant literary term/definition for this phenomenon (with the exception of M. Lipovetsky’s recently suggested metaproza). This problem can be conceptualised in G. Tihanov’s terms of ‘re-forming literature’ and ‘regimes of relevance’: can we use theory created during one regime of relevance to analyse the works originating from another? How productive would this analysis be?
My presentation would address this problem on the material of my research project, which explores late 19th century Russian political novels. Self-consciously ideological, these novelistic narratives also reflect and express their authors’ awareness of literary conventions. The combination of two self-consiousnesses, ideological and narrative, results in a certain type of novelistic form that I describe and define as a specific sub-genre. I would focus on the role theoretical models play in shaping methodological approach to literary texts, providing examples of how easily literary texts, especially those with a political agenda, can be misinterpreted and how important it is to be aware of the general philosophical and historical framework in which literary theories originate.