Literary Landscapes of Collision: Life and Afterlives of Russian Realism

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel investigates techniques of philosophical, political, and artistic collision within the 19th-century Realist canon in the Russian language. From the center of the canon with I. A. Goncharov (The Precipice) and M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (History of a Town) through a detour to V. G. Korolenko (On a Cloudy Day), the papers interpret Realism as a site of experimentation for the making of histories, bodies, and utopias.

The temporality of the panel spans the life and afterlife of Realism. By looking at Realist novels in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and populist fiction in the 1890s, the trajectory follows the formation, consolidation, and reverberations of Realism beyond its “own” age. Korolenko’s retrospective belonging to Realist writing, along with Goncharov’s conservative restoration of the past for future purposes and Saltykov-Shchedrin’s creative reconstruction of chronicles, generates an intellectual tension that destabilizes past, memory, and history.

By combining multiple temporal dimensions with the city-countryside polarity of imperial geography, the papers offer diverse frames to analyze the contradictions lying at the core of the Realist effect. Conservative consciousness collapses the temporalities of the estate utopia, traditional literary devices disrupt the telos of history-writing from within, and populist disputes dissolve the body of the peasant woman. The enmeshment of literary analysis with intellectual history and critical theory brings to the fore the Realist authors’ creative rearticulation of the philosophical contentions of their time, while also showing their influence on the epistemic discussions of the years to follow.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Asher Anthony Maria, U of Pennsylvania

Papers

• Ivan Goncharov’s 'The Precipice' As Conservative Utopia - Piotr Kawulok, U of Wisconsin-Madison

• Truth over Telos: Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Reconsideration of the Chronicler in The History of a Town - Emma George, Princeton U

• As Rumor Makes It: Strategic Idealism and the Subtextual Peasant Woman in Vladimir Korolenko's 'On a Cloudy Day' - Sofia Guerra, Princeton U

Discussant

• Jennifer Flaherty, Duke University