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Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Russian Literature

From Sorochyntsi To St. Petersburg: National Identity In The Works Of Nikolai Gogol, Gary Jay Kogoy Jr. Jan 2026

From Sorochyntsi To St. Petersburg: National Identity In The Works Of Nikolai Gogol, Gary Jay Kogoy Jr.

Honors Theses

Nikolai Gogol's extant works depict a man torn between his birthplace of Ukraine and the nineteenth-century milieu of Imperial Russia. Notably, he did not reveal his name for some time after publishing his first story collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka; as a result, readers attributed the tales of Ukrainian life within not to Gogol, but to the charming "Ukrainian jester" persona of Rudy Panko. Even after revealing his identity and garnering respect in the St. Petersburg literary scene, his contemporaries often viewed him as sly and suspicious because of his ancestry. Perhaps due to external doubts regarding …


Book Review: Interpreting Chekhov’S Prose, Galina Rylkova Jun 2025

Book Review: Interpreting Chekhov’S Prose, Galina Rylkova

Russian Language Journal

Interpreting Chekhov’s Prose consists of an introduction by Donald Rayfield and fifteen chapters that were previously published at different scholarly venues. What unites these chapters is Polakiewicz’s focus on representatives of the medical profession and the various diseases they encountered as depicted in Chekhov’s prose.


Maxim Gorky’S Illusionary Reformation Of Human Nature And The Rise Of The Soviet Citizen: Socialist Realism As A Constructive Force In Mother, Alysia Gayle Meyer May 2025

Maxim Gorky’S Illusionary Reformation Of Human Nature And The Rise Of The Soviet Citizen: Socialist Realism As A Constructive Force In Mother, Alysia Gayle Meyer

Honors Projects

This paper examines the origins and evolution of the Socialist Realism movement headed by Maxim Gorky, as a defining ideological and artistic framework of the Stalin era. Emerging in response to the experimental avant-garde movements of Revolutionary Russia, Socialist Realism sought to construct the ideal Soviet Reality, reimaging society and its citizens through the lens of collectivism, labor, and ideological purity. Central to this exploration is Gorky’s first major Socialist Realist novel, Mother, which serves as a blueprint for depicting the ideal Soviet citizen. By analyzing the motivations behind this movement and its portrayal of utopian ideals, this study reveals …


No Unified Ableukhov: Orientalism And Imperialism In Andrei Bely's Petersburg., Tuesday Shaw May 2025

No Unified Ableukhov: Orientalism And Imperialism In Andrei Bely's Petersburg., Tuesday Shaw

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

This project brings into dialogue the 1913 Russian novel Petersburg by Andrei Bely and postcolonial approaches to literature, primarily those developed by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1994). Petersburg was the product of an artistic movement, Symbolism, that idealized breaking apart boundaries between artforms. Said’s notion of Orientalism, in contrast, is based on the idea that there is an essential division between “East” and “West.” While there might appear to be a tension in applying a theory premised on division to a work that apparently wants to dissolve all boundaries, attention to Petersburg’s depiction of …


Raising The Iron Curtain: Healing Collective Oppression Through Literature, Alisa Chirkova-Holland Apr 2023

Raising The Iron Curtain: Healing Collective Oppression Through Literature, Alisa Chirkova-Holland

Student Works

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by former gulag prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is a short novel that entails an ordinary day for a prisoner, Shukhov, in a Siberian gulag. Although the work is a typical skaz, a traditional Russian narrative form, the novel was well-received by Russians at the time of publishing in 1962. This paper will explore the reason for such acclamation, understanding how Solzhenitsyn’s innovations to the skaz allowed readers to connect with their past. The paper also mentions theories such as Traumatic Realism to comprehend how such a bleak novel positively impacted post-Stalinist readers. …


Writing Dystopia: Zamyatin’S Writing Philosophy, Genre, And The Protagonist Of We, Kelly A. Gallagher May 2022

Writing Dystopia: Zamyatin’S Writing Philosophy, Genre, And The Protagonist Of We, Kelly A. Gallagher

College Honors Program

This thesis examines how Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) came to write one of the first literary dystopias. I argue that he designed dystopia in his novel We as a place that threatens the creation of what he considered “true literature,” in order to show why his conception of true literature is essential to the survival of the human spirit. The first chapter synthesizes Zamyatin’s critical essays and biographical details to reveal his writing philosophy, which I characterize as his belief that “creative revolution” sustains literature’s movement forward into the future. The second chapter explores why Zamyatin’s philosophy may have …


Doppelgängers And Doubles In Literature: A Comparison Of Fyodor Dostoevsky’S Crime And Punishment And Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, Meghan E. Cooper May 2021

Doppelgängers And Doubles In Literature: A Comparison Of Fyodor Dostoevsky’S Crime And Punishment And Vladimir Nabokov’S Lolita, Meghan E. Cooper

College Honors Program

This thesis is dedicated to the concept of the double character in literature and how such characters were utilized by authors Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita (1955). First, this thesis discusses the theoretical aspects of the double—a villainous character who mirrors another character in some way, whether in appearance or in their actions— and the religious, psychological, philosophical, and societal roots of the concept of a double in literature. Then it explores how double characters in Dostoevsky and Nabokov’s works serve a crucial role in their novels by mirroring the worst traits of …


Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt Sep 2018

Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …


Classical Literature And The Retroaction Of Socialist Ideology—The Sovietization Of A Medieval Georgian Epic Poem And Its Mysterious Author, Diego Benning Wang Apr 2018

Classical Literature And The Retroaction Of Socialist Ideology—The Sovietization Of A Medieval Georgian Epic Poem And Its Mysterious Author, Diego Benning Wang

Madison Historical Review

Shota Rustaveli, presumed author of the medieval Georgian epic poem vepkhistqaosani (The Knight in the Panther's Skin), was one of the most celebrated cultural and historical figures in Soviet Georgia. However, not much is known about Rustaveli apart from his work. In this essay, I argue that a series of policies under the Soviet government transformed Rustaveli into a national symbol of Georgia, but the celebration of Rustaveli and his poem scarcely deviated from the ideological guidelines of the Soviet state. In discussing the impact and legacy of the Soviet promotion of Rustaveli, I purport to highlight the "national in …


A Reader's Beheading: Nabokov's Invitation And Authorial Utopia, Aaron Botwick Jan 2015

A Reader's Beheading: Nabokov's Invitation And Authorial Utopia, Aaron Botwick

Publications and Research

“A Reader’s Beheading: Nabokov’s Invitation and Authorial Utopia” argues that Invitation to a Beheading polemically outlines Nabokov’s position on the relationship between reader and writer: in other words, that writing and reading are difficult, elite pursuits whose meanings should necessarily be available only to those willing to face and surmount the magician’s challenges. Narratively, it operates as a kind of roman à clef in which Cincinnatus C. follows a trajectory towards artistic freedom (or authorial utopia) where he is liberated from the constraints of poor readers—among them literalists and Freudians—while Nabokov, ever the unaccommodating creator, frustrates that progression with the …


Zamayatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (1884-1937), Yvonne Howell Sep 2005

Zamayatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (1884-1937), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Zamayatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (1884-1967), Russian engineer, fiction writer, critic-essayist, and editor. Zamayatin was born in the provincial town of Lebedyan in central Russia. He joined the Bolshevik Party in opposition to the tsar's regime while still a student of naval engineering in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. He was imprisoned and exiled from St. Petersburg, an experience that provided material for his first short novels and stories.


We (1924), Yvonne Howell Sep 2005

We (1924), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

One of the first and most important works of modern dystopian literature, this novel by Russian writer Evgeny Zamayatin was written in 1919-1920 and published in English in 1924. The original Russian version was not authorized for publication in the Soviet Union until 1988, when Gorbachev's policy of culture openness (glasnost) allowed readers access to twentieth-century Russian literature inimical to the communist project.


A Calendar Of Wisdom. Daily Thoughts To Nourish The Soul. Written And Selected From The World's Sacred Texts (Book Review), Yvonne Howell Jan 1999

A Calendar Of Wisdom. Daily Thoughts To Nourish The Soul. Written And Selected From The World's Sacred Texts (Book Review), Yvonne Howell

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Tolstoy spent over fifteen years collecting "the wisdom of the centuries in one book" (6). He began compiling this wisdom in written form, as quotes from the world's sacred texts and from famous (as well as obscure) artists, in 1902-1903. The first version of the resulting book was published in 1904. It was reprinted three times during his lifetime, variously titled Thoughts of Wise Men, A Circle of Reading, or The Way of Life. It is the early version of the book that made it into the 1957 Soviet edition of Tolstoy's collected works as Krug chteniia: …


Begging The Earth's Forgiveness: Russian Folklore In The Novels Of F. M. Dostoevsky, Wendy Kristine Chia-Klesch Apr 1997

Begging The Earth's Forgiveness: Russian Folklore In The Novels Of F. M. Dostoevsky, Wendy Kristine Chia-Klesch

English Theses & Dissertations

The pervading theme of Dostoevsky's novels is humanity's need to discover meaning in the natural world and in human experience. For generations, the Russian peasantry created myths and folk tales in order to understand the workings of Damp Mother Earth and to endow the earth and their lives with meaning. By the nineteenth century, however, the principles of Western materialism, which Dostoevsky likened to "intelligent bacteria," began to drift across the border and infect the Russian intelligentsia. These new Westernizers devoted themselves to dismantling existing religious and folk traditions and replacing them with a modern sign system based on science …


The Great Day: A Fantasy Play In Five Acts, Six Scenes By Vladimir Kirshon, Christopher Lee Philips Oct 1984

The Great Day: A Fantasy Play In Five Acts, Six Scenes By Vladimir Kirshon, Christopher Lee Philips

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Vladimir Kirshon was a proletarian playwright of the Soviet Union who died in the Great Purge. The thesis presents an English version of the author's last play, The Great Day, which is preceded by an introduction which places Kirshon and his plays in their proper historical context. The introduction details Kirshon's political and artistic background and his politico-literary position as a playwright. The introduction and analysis of the play produce an understanding of Vladimir Kirshon as a Soviet proletarian playwright and an understanding of the spirit in which The Great Day was written.


Gogol: An Overview, David Paul Allen Apr 1972

Gogol: An Overview, David Paul Allen

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

No abstract provided.