Russian Literature Commons^™

“Le Soleil De France”: Warm Translations Of Guy De Maupassant In Works By Isaak Babel’ And Ivan Bunin, Cassio De Oliveira

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the wake of Lev Tolstoi’s appraisals of his work, Guy de Maupassant was embraced by Russian twentieth-century authors who admired his mastery of the short story. The Soviet writer Isaak Babel’ and the émigré writer Ivan Bunin reference stories and other texts by Maupassant in their stories ‘Guy de Maupassant’ and ‘Bernard’. To these authors, Maupassant constitutes a means of expressing their own outlook on the craft of literature. Mediated by the act of translation from French into Russian, Maupassant’s writing enables the Russian authors to articulate distinct identities regarding their national literature: as Soviet and émigré.

The Paganist Totem Birds In Slavic Folklore: The Black And The White, Anastasia Radzievska

Dissertations and Theses

It is believed that pagan cosmology once ran strong through the Slavic countries and traces are visible through the passed down folklore that spread through the land. While we talk of animals and their representation in folklore, we usually only refer to the Christian written western folklore, but these pagan born animals stand in strong contrast to them. The Slavic people believed that the world was made of diverse natural forces that shared what the Earth had to offer and worked in unison to protect one another, whereas the Christian belief saw the world as a distinct separation of man …

On Angels’ Wings: Idolatry In Viktoria Tokareva’S “Five Figures On A Pedestal” And Lyudmila Ulitskaya’S “Angel”, Courtney E. Bentz

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

In his essays on Greek deities, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared: “Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.” While the idea of gods taking a corporeal form or angels walking among humans is a common literary trope, seldom do mortal characters find themselves compared to the divine without negative repercussions. Select post-Soviet women writers, however, flip this trope to explore the opposite. They instead embrace the human as holy, restrained by little consequence, as a means to highlight its destructive qualities in the context of an intimate relationship. These contemporary authors, Viktoria Tokareva and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, …

Issues Of Modernity In Russian And U.S. Southern Discourse: Literary And Cinematic Crosscurrents, Zachary John Killebrew

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation traces formulations of modernity, national and regional identity, and economy in the literature and film of Russia and the U.S. South from serfdom to the Second World War. Studying serf and slave narratives, Russian Realist and Southern Renaissance novels such as The Brothers Karamazov (1879), Demons (1872), The Sound and the Fury (1929), Tobacco Road (1932), and Wise Blood (1952), and American and Soviet films such as Volga, Volga (1938) and Cabin in the Sky (1943), this examination locates within Russo-Southern discourses a shared interest in striking out against Western or Northern epistemologies to assert a “peripheral” modernity …

Ivan And His Doubles: The Failure Of Intellect In The Brothers Karamazov, Alex Donley

Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship

The purpose of this research is to explore Dostoevsky’s theodicy in The Brothers Karamazov, including key critical commentary that enhances an understanding of the text. One of the novel’s title characters, Ivan, embodies the emerging spirit of intellectualism and freethinking in nineteenth-century Europe. He confronts the Christian concept of God in two famous speeches. First, Ivan’s “Rebellion” epitomizes the problem of evil by asking why an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God allows earthy atrocities. Second, Ivan’s “Grand Inquisitor” rejects the moral freedom given to men, reasoning that it is too great a burden for mankind to bear. These arguments remain relevant …

Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko And The Conclusion Of Dostoevsky’S Idiot, Saera Yoon, Robert O. Efird

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Final Words, Final Shots: Kurosawa, Bortko, and the Conclusion of Dostoevsky’s Idiot" Robert O. Efird and Saera Yoon discuss film adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel. Both in his homeland and abroad, the major works of Fyodor Dostoevsky have largely made for disappointing film adaptations. This article examines the cultural diversity and aesthetic motivations underlying two very different adaptations of his novel Idiot, with particular attention to the concluding scenes. Both Akira Kurosawa and Vladimir Bortko follow the novelist's lead by hinting at some form of hope and future redemption amidst the tragedy but, for different reasons, …

Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …

Intertextuality, Aesthetics, And The Digital: Rediscovering Chekhov In Early British Modernism, Sam Jacob

Modernist Short Story Project

Mark Halliday’s poem, “Chekhov,” published in 1992, raises a simple yet profound question regarding the Russian playwright and author, Anton Chekhov: What do we get from Chekhov? Considering the present article’s particular focus, Halliday’s query may be used to ask how Chekhov influenced early modernist writers (circa 1900-1930) from the British literary context. However, when considering the amount of scholarly work devoted to this question, the initial simplicity of Halliday’s inquiry evaporates, giving way to a breadth of complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. Such ambiguity has led scholars attempting to trace the intertextual convergence between Chekhov and the early modernist writers …

Vladimir Mayakovsky’S Agit-Semitism, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

Images of Jewishness as ethnic, cultural, and biblical categories in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s works are both plentiful and understudied. The present article attempts to bridge this gap while exploring the mechanisms that guide the poet’s responses to anti-Semitism. I begin by focusing on the function of the Exodus story in Stikhi ob Amerike(Verses about America), and then move to Mayakovsky’s “agitational” works: his collaboration on the film Evrei na zemle(Jews on the Land, 1927), and his poems ““Evrei (Tovarishcham iz OZETa)” (“Jew [To Comrades from OZET],” 1926) and “‘Zhid’” (“‘Yid’,” 1928). I argue that, while Mayakovsky continues the established …

Forbidden Attraction: Russian Poets Read T. S. Eliot During The Cold War, Nataliya Karageorgos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this study is to demonstrate how the reception of T. S. Eliot, one of the leading proponents of Anglo-American modernism, shaped the aesthetics of Russian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, Russian culture found itself in a unique situation of separation from the Western world, with which it had largely identified in the previous century. The official change of the cultural paradigm that took place in the aftermath of the October Revolution led to the advancement of the literary theory and practices of Socialist Realism, shutting off modernist tendencies and …

Coming To Terms With Gonzo Journalism : An Analysis In Russian Formalism., Beau Kilpatrick

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gonzo journalism is notoriously difficult to define because of its ambiguous nature. To date, scholarly definitions focus on historical interpretations of Gonzo’s content, its connection to social and political contexts, or the biography of Hunter S. Thompson. These definitional attempts neglect the formal devices of the composition. This thesis aims to redefine Gonzo as its own genre by using the nearly forgotten methods of Russian formalism—specifically the works of Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Boris Tomashevsky—to analyze the formal devices and components of its form. The results are twofold; first, it acts to rejuvenate an unpopular literary theory by illustrating …

Introduction. Dialogues With Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews 1967-1968., Slav N. Gratchev, Irina Evdokimova

Modern Languages Faculty Research

Dialogues with Shklovsky: The Duvakin Interviews 1967–1968 reflects the spirit of times—when the most dramatic events of the twentieth century were happening in Russia and the USSR. The first English translation of the 1967–1968 interviews with the founder of the Formalist School of literary theory, Viktor Shklovsky, this volume offers a slice of Russian micro-history that relies on the living voice of that history. Through the transcription of a six-hour phono-document, the readers will hear the voice of a real participant in events that for the longest time in the USSR were forbidden to be discussed or written about.

Don Quixote In Russia In The 1920s-1930s: The Problem Of Perception And Interpretation, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This study logically continues my previous examination of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia throughout the early twentieth century and how this perception changed over time. In this new article, which will be the third in a sequence of five, I will again use a number of materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars to demonstrate how the perception of Don Quixote by Russian intelligentsia shifted from being skeptical to complete admiration and even glorification of the hero. Don Quixote was increasingly compared with Prometheus, the most powerful and most romanticized personage of Greek methodology. Indeed, “. . . начав юмористический …

The Embodied Language Of Sasha Sokolov’S A School For Fools, José Vergara

Russian Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Blood, Water And Mars: Soviet Science And The Alchemy For A New Man, Sophie Y. Andarovna

All Master's Theses

The themes of blood, water and Mars in Soviet science and technology show the strong utopian and even religious foundations of Soviet society, which invariably centered around forging a new environment and, in so doing, a new variety of human to inhabit it. In the minds and experiments of some of the radical men behind Russia’s Revolution, blood was to create a more advanced, biologically “equal” humanity capable of potential immortality, while water was harnessed with the millenarian aim of transforming the Soviet Union’s vast landscape into fields of bountiful fertility, as well as cities of efficient industry. Mars represents …

Introduction: Scotland And Russia Since 1900, Anna Vaninskaya

Studies in Scottish Literature

Introduces the project "Scottish-Russian Cultural Relations since 1900," based at the University of Edinburgh, the series of related symposia in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, and its extensive web-site of translations and other resources, and provides a brief narrative of cultural interactions between Scotland and Russia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including such key examples as the Russian presence at the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901, Korney Chukovsky's account of visiting Scottish troops in 1916, and the the Scotland-USSR Society's welcome to the Russian Burns translator Samuil Marshak and Burns biographer Anna Elistratova during the International Burns Festival of 1955.

Translations Of Robert Burns In The Russian Book Market: The Old And The New, Natalia Kaloh Vid

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the influence of Samuil Marshak's long-dominant Russian translations of Robert Burns's poems and the more recent anthologies and translations that "broke the Marshak monopoly," and briefly examines why, in publishing terms, the Marshak translations are still the most widely available.

‘The Shadow And The Law’: Stevenson, Nabokov And Dostoevsky, Rose France

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses Vladimir Nabokov's comments in lectures at Cornell praising Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde while condemning Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and compares the two novels' treatment of the double in their central character with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita.

'Like Pushkin, I': Hugh Macdiarmid And Russia, Patrick Crotty

Studies in Scottish Literature

A detailed discussion of the poetic development of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiamid (1892-1978), drawing on research for the forthcoming Complete Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid to chart the changing ways in which he encountered, read, and responded to Russian writing, philosophy and culture in different phases of his career.

Contributors To Ssl 44.1

Studies in Scottish Literature

No abstract provided.

Syllabus: “Until It Was No More:” The Cold War And The Fall Of The Ussr In Literature And Film (Russian 221), Anna Aydinyan

Russian 225: “Until It Was No More” The Cold War and the Fall of the USSR in Literature and Film

No abstract provided.

Mikhail Bakhtin’S Heritage In Literature, Arts, And Psychology. Introduction, Slav N. Gratchev, Howard Mancing

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This volume celebrates hundred years of Bakhtin’s heritage: in September 13 of 1919 in the literary journal Den Iskusstva (The Day of the Art) was published the first work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, the work that became his literary manifesto.

This book aims to examine the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, we drew upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world--United States, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, France, Russia, Chile, and Japan--in order to bring the widest variety of points of view on the subject. But we also wanted …

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 19^th 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 …

Old Belief And The Balance Of Red And Blue: How Old Believers Managed Cultural Infringement, Joseph K. Van Den Berg

History

This paper covers the spread of the Old Believers into Western society, studying how they changed and evolved during the Cold War. The paper focuses on two communities, using them to compare the different attitudes Old Believers had towards differing host cultures. Using a litany of newspapers and the work of a few dedicated anthropologists, "Old Belief and the Balance of Red and Blue: How Old Believers Managed Cultural Infringement" shows the vast array of responses to a small group of Russian sectarians establishing themselves within Western Cultures of differing size and values.

The Centrality Of Human Freedom In Dostoevsky And Huxley, Evelyn J. Hylton

Masters Theses

Fyodor Dostoevsky learned the hard way that human beings need to be free. In a Siberian prison camp, a four-year period which would later inspire his semi-autobiographical prison memoir Notes from a Dead House, he was forced to come to terms with the realities of life under severe constraint and without the freedom for self-actualization, which convicted him of the dangers of the Westernized liberalism he once embraced. Dostoevsky’s transformed understanding of humanity and its need for individual freedom eventually matured to form the moral and philosophical foundations of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, whose support of the centrality …

Title., Douglas Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Title is a series of drawings that explores the aspects of failed projects and the complications of representation within literary and visual practices. This series is informed by preliminary drawings, marginalia, and written notations that are inherent in the formulation processes of both visual and literary compositions. Through an investigation of the 19th Century Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s unfinished novel Dead Souls, I situate this series of drawings as a means to conflate literary theories with visual representation. In this way, the Title series presents fragmentary images, texts, and digressive narratives that demonstrate intermediaries between propositional states and reconciled …

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 …

Dostoevsky As A Translator Of "Eugénie Grandet", Julia Titus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The focus of this study in comparative criticism is a close analysis of Dostoevsky’s first literary publication - his 1844 translation of the first edition of Balzac’s Eugе́nie Grandet (1834) and the stylistic choices that he made as a young writer while working on Balzac’s novel. Through the prism of close reading this dissertation analyzes Dostoevsky’s literary debut in the context of his future mature aesthetic style and poetics. Comparing the original and the translation side by side, the dissertation focuses on the omissions, additions and substitutions that Dostoevsky brought into the text. It demonstrates how young Dostoevsky’s free translation …

The Distorted Images And Realities Of Andrei Bitov’S Literary Photographs., José Vergara

Russian Faculty Research and Scholarship

Although Andrei Bitov’s best-known exploration of photography remains “Pushkin’s Photograph (1799–2099),” in which a young Pushkinist travels into the past to capture the poet’s image on film, this motif in fact appears throughout many of the author’s major works. This study addresses the two conflicting stances regarding photography that Bitov develops across a variety of genres. On the one hand, the manner in which a photo attempts to freeze or distort reality according to a particular worldview deeply disturbs his narrators, both fictional and semi-autobiographical. It becomes a tool for manipulation in texts such as “View of the Trojan Sky” …

Ideology In Literature And Literature As Ideology: Totalitarian And Reactionary Appropriation Of Resistant Texts, Huntley Hughes

Master’s Theses

This thesis seeks to explore the means by which nominally or potentially resistant texts are appropriated into violent or exploitative political structures for propaganda and profit. In the first chapter two pre-soviet Russian novels closely associated with the radical tradition are examined, through the lens of literary analysis, in order to uncover the ways in which ideologically egalitarian revolutionary movements can degenerate into authoritarian regimes. The second chapter is concerned with a Welsh text, How Green Was My Valley, which, despite being concerned with the conditions of the Welsh mining class, utilizes the narrative form of childhood recollection to insidiously …