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In one of his final public statements, at the Pushkin celebration of 1880, Fyodor Dostoevsky notoriously placed “universal responsiveness” at the heart of Russia’s national and imperial identity. Here and in his other writings, he equates the quality of “Russianness” with insight into a single, absolute divine ideal that underlies the diversity and chaos of contemporary reality. Dostoevsky thus envisioned Russian language and culture as a prophetic engine of “universal” translation, destined to propel all humanity toward the apocalyptic end of history. In this talk, Chloe Kitzinger confronts Dostoevsky’s violent utopian nationalism by following the theme of translation through The Diary of a Writer (1873–81). She will show how Dostoevsky drew on both German Romantic and Russian Slavophile thought to frame a messianic national project: the charge to foster Russian as a new Adamic language, and thus return Earth to the condition of paradise. She argues that Dostoevsky’s nationalist politics of language laid the groundwork for his own cultlike reception in translation. Penetration into the absolute inner “essence” of unfolding human life became Dostoevsky’s defining trait for many 20th-century readers—most immediately, for the Russian modernists who became his globally influential editors and critics.
Chloë Kitzinger is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching focus on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel. She is the author of Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in such venues as Slavic and East European Journal, Nabokov Studies, NOVEL, Narrative, and The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms. Kitzinger’s current book project is Dostoevsky’s Afterlives: Visions in Translation, a study of Dostoevsky’s early global reception through the prism of Russian modernism. She is also co-editing the anthology Seers of Flesh and Spirit: Russian Symbolist Writings on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (under advance contract with Amherst College Press). She was a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Jordan Center in Spring 2024.
