Masks of Reality: The Many Faces of Russian Realism

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

As a genre, “Realism” has been defined, questioned, set aside, and reinterpreted by literary scholars time and time again – from the foundational work of Roman Jakobson (Raboty po poetike, 1987) through the recent contributions of Ilya Kliger, Kirill Ospovat, Margarita Vaisman and Alexey Vdovin.

The question of what, exactly, Realism as a literary movement attempts to represent has continued to be a relevant one. With such indeterminacy of Realism in mind, this panel explores the many “faces” of Russian Realism in the 19th-century, putting into perspective its attempts at representations of reality.

The panel’s participants look at a range of themes presented under the guise of “reality” and touch on questions that concern nationhood, language, and the creation of a “Russian” identity through literature across genres: Russian “tsygany” as echoes of Romanticism, anti-nihilist subtexts in an explanatory dictionary, ruins as mimesis of Enlightenment's legacy, or ruins resisting their picturesque fate.

As such, the literary works discussed represent the different authorial efforts of articulating a kind of social imaginary, including Vladimir Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language; Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Traveller and Vsevolod Garshin’s “The Bears”; Ivan Turgenev’s “On The Eve”; Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Fiona Bell, U of Utah

Papers

• Romanticism Reloaded: The 'Tsygany' of Nikolai Leskov and Vsevolod Garshin - Paula Domingo Pasarin, Princeton U

• Indexing Anti-Nihilism: Vladimir Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language - Taisia Crowley, Princeton U

• 'All Turned to Rot and Gape': The Picturesque Ruin in Gogol’s Dead Souls and 'Old World Landowners' - Dario Lucero, New York U

• Realism in Ruins: Representations of Tsaritsynoin Nineteenth-Century Russia - Graham Weaver, New York U

Discussant

• Olga Y. Maiorova, U of Michigan