Romanticism Reloaded: The 'Tsygany' of Nikolai Leskov and Vsevolod Garshin

• In Event: Masks of Reality: The Many Faces of Russian Realism

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate that, in Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer and Vsevolod Garshin’s The Bears, far from a crude orientalist depiction, the Realist tsygan is a gateway to portray the inner-foreign, namely, that which was naturally intrinsic but has been expelled or rejected. In this sense, I hope to prove that, as evidenced by the archetype of the tsygan in these two works, content-wise there was a significant carry-over from Romanticism to Realism in Russian literature. Thus, from a narrative point of view, the tsygan in Leskov and Garshin acts as a shrewd literary device, opening their realist works to non-realist topics without breaking the paradigm of “realistic representation or reality.”

Author

• Paula Domingo Pasarin, Princeton U