The Power of Memory in Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Literary Culture

Session Submission Type: Panel

Affiliate Organization: Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association

Brief Description

Russian literary culture of the late the eighteenth century saw a step-change in the representation of the human self and subjectivity. It proved to be a rich field of enquiry for poets, religious thinkers, prose writers, and scientists inspired to understand the relation between reason and feeling, the spiritual and the bodily. Memory was conceived as one cognitive faculty that stood alongside the senses in processing individual experience. As it contributed to the capacity to draw conclusions based on remembered experience, to assist in reasoning, making judgments, and thinking about time, it achieved a new prominence in the way literary writing, including life-writing, represented the development of the “I.” The papers on the panel share a curiosity about how memory informs thinking about conduct, personal and public, private and social. Biblical memory is not simply a matter of rote learning and recital of scripture to demonstrate piety, but helps authors and readers imagine an ideal self (Paper 1). That ideal self can also be projected as an imaginary better self in the figure of the friend, an exemplar of the ‘beautiful soul’ to be commemorated textually (Paper 2). How the self can position itself to be remembered is also a question that inspired writers. Can self and soul continue to exist after the death of the body, endowed with a memory of earthly existence? Or is the survival of the self a function of cultural memory? These questions come to a head at the end of the century (Paper 3).

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Irina Reyfman, Columbia U

Papers

• Remembering, Removing, Remaking: Biblical Memory in Radishchev and Masonic Writings - Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, U of Southern California

• 'Friends of My Soul': Radishchev on Friendship and Immortality - Myles Garbarini, Columbia U

• Death and the Afterlife in Derzhavin, Karamzin and Radishchev - Andrew Kahn, U of Oxford (UK)

Discussant

• Luba Golburt, UC Berkeley