The Politics of Literary Description on the Eve of the Emancipation of the Serfs

• In Event: The Communicating Vessels: Press and Public Opinion in Imperial Russia

Abstract

It is a commonplace that Russian literature in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was highly politicized. Scholars have long stressed that many of the most influential critics of the time evaluated works of literature for their social utility or the soundness of their politics at the expense of attention to their literary qualities. This paper argues that the status of fiction in the realist period as a surrogate venue for public discourse motivated attentive aesthetic evaluation even, or perhaps especially, by the so-called utilitarian critics. Central to the argument are the politics of description. Literary criticism of the period abounds in concern about the status of the detail. A commonly noted aesthetic deficiency of any given work was its use of “accidental” (sluchainyi) or excessive detail. A tendency to “daguerreotype,” to accumulate unintegrated, arbitrary documentary detail was frequently adduced to dismiss a work’s significance on both aesthetic and political grounds. On the basis of the critical discourse around the publication of Marko Vovchok’s (Mariia Vilinska’s) stories of Ukrainian and Russian peasant life in 1859, this paper proposes that the aesthetic, cognitive, and political valences that literary description accrued in contemporary criticism were rooted in the idea that literature was a key force for shaping public opinion and, ultimately, for mobilizing social action.

Author

• Vadim Shneyder, UCLA