The Multiethnic Empire in a Single Body: On the 'Smuglaia' Russian Heroine

• In Event: Fictions of National Identity in Imperial Russian Literature II

Abstract

This paper discusses the "smuglaia" (“swarthy”) Russian heroine in nineteenth-century Russian fiction. The author argues that the trope of the Russian woman’s racial indeterminacy—her supposed mix between western and eastern, white and non-white, Russian and other ethnicities in empire—metonymizes the multi-ethnic Russian Empire in the individual gendered body. This trope serves an ethnonationalist program in Dostoevsky's fiction, as will be suggested with a reading of Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. We may be more surprised to find it, for instance, in Chernyshevsky's "smuglaia" Vera Pavlovna; yet, as this paper argues, the Russian woman's "precarious" whiteness is a widespread preoccupation that serves various political and aesthetic programs in the nineteenth century.

Author

• Fiona Bell, Yale U