Join us for another 19v seminar!
In fin-de-siècle Western Europe, the so-called “Russian nihilist” was a continual object of fear and fascination in an atmosphere of rapidly proliferating mass media. The roots of this talk come from ongoing research that began in French archives and with French newspapers: why were there so many highly gendered references to “nihilism” in documents from this era, long after nihilism had its moment in Russia? How “real” was Russian nihilism for audiences in this time period, and why had it proved so durable? Using representations of the “female Russian nihilist” as a means of answering these broader questions, this talk will explore the mutually generative relationship between the real, the imagined, and the media that sustained such fantastical images of Russians. Ultimately, we will see how this kind of widely disseminated, gendered archetypal representation has long influenced what the West purports to “know” about Russia.
Watch the event recording on YouTube here.
