Join us for another 19v seminar!
The study of literature in Russia challenges notions about the markets, readers, and writers of Russian literature, which was quite well integrated with European markets. According to my data, foreign novels accounted for around 90% of the market through the middle of the century. European sentimental novels, translations, and women writers circulated internationally, and were central to the fabric of nineteenth-century literary life throughout Europe and Russia. George Sand may be the most studied of European women writers in Russia, but given her outsize international role, she is vastly understudied and not properly understood. Sand played a central role in shaping Russia's novels, which becomes evident when we examine how Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky each in turn transformed her 1842 novel Horace. They had inherited a problem that was central for Pushkin in Eugene Onegin and his prose: how to adapt European novels to Russia's distinctive noble service culture.
Watch the event recording on YouTube here.
