Toward a Poetics of Agitation Literature: The Case of Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s Skazka o kopeike

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Narrative I: Literatures as Political Practice and Critique

Abstract

In the context of the panel’s general concern with literature as political practice, this paper attempts to bring into focus a number of fictional texts produced explicitly for political education and agitation among the common people (especially the peasants) within the framework of the Chaikovskii circle (Bol’shoe obshchestvo propagandy). Authored, sometimes individually sometimes collectively, by a number of prominent Russian populists (narodniki), such as Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, Lev Tikhomirov, Leonid Shishko, these texts were published and distributed illegally by members of the circle and other activists, beginning during the period of 1873-75. My case study for the purposes of this paper will be Stepniak-Kravchinsky’s wildly popular Skazka o kopeike (1874), and my analysis will be guided by three approaches. I will examine the text from the perspective of the interpolation of the implied reader/listener (Iser), of genre (especially Jolles’s “simple forms”) and actantial narrative structure (Greimas).

Author

• Ilya Kliger, New York U