Fictions of National Identity in Imperial Russian Literature II

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The presentations on this panel offer critical approaches to conservative and radical writers’ constructions of “Russianness” in 19th-century Russian literature. Papers examine both journalistic discourse (“thick journals”) and artistic prose using decolonial frameworks that reveal the racial and political anxieties motivating the articulation of a single “Russian idea,” as well as the crises in artistic representation that they demonstrate. Victoria Thorstensson (Carleton College) puts Boleslav Markevich’s 1870s conservative writings in thick journals in dialogue with his heroes in The Turning Point, The Abyss, and A Quarter of a Century Ago. Fiona Bell (Yale U) offers an investigation of the “swarthy” Russian heroine in The Brothers Karamazov and Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, revealing the precarity of whiteness as much as the fundamental instability of Russian identity. Lindsay Ceballos (Lafayette College) returns to journals of the late 1860s, examining the specific audience of Dostoevsky’s Idiot at the time of its publication. It proposes the rhetorical challenges of the writer’s articulation of his nationalist ideal, as well as the difficulty he encountered representing its utopian futurity in fiction.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Chloe Kitzinger, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

Papers

• Boleslav Markevich's Russian Fictions - Victoria Y. Thorstensson, Carleton College

• The Multiethnic Empire in a Single Body: On the 'Smuglaia' Russian Heroine - Fiona Bell, Yale U

• Revisiting the Failures of 'The Idiot' - Lindsay Marie Ceballos, Lafayette College

Discussant

• Valeria Sobol, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign