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Join us for another installment of the 19v seminar.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

This talk will explore how the pastoralism of Notes from a Hunter neither ignores history nor gives up on the nostalgic dream of frozen time as it moves between poles of dynamism and repose and struggles with the relentless expectations of progress together with the complacency of self-acceptance. While characters battling against the past and dissatisfied with the present become the material for Turgenev’s later novels, the pastoral present, a temporal position alternating between energy and repose, shapes Turgenev’s mature narrative in response to the problem of freedom raised by the exploration of peasant life.

 

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In this talk, Professor Ilya Vinitsky, with discussant Maxim Hanukai, will focus on aesthetic and ideological implications of the first translation of the “Gabrieliad” (Гавриилиада, 1821) into English (and, for that matter, into any foreign language) by Max Eastman (1883-1969). Eastman was an American poet, novelist, essayist, socialist, feminist, friend of John Reed, and editor of left-wing modernist magazines The Masses and The Liberator. He was also Leon Trotsky’s biographer, translator, and unofficial literary agent, introducing Western readers to Lenin’s so-called “Testament.”

Why did a nineteenth-century frivolous poem turn out to be such a magnetic text for Eastman, as well as for the cohort of other Western translators? Professor Vinitsky argues that the paradox of the “Gabrieliad” is that this bawdy and blasphemous work has been read in the West as a poetic manifesto of free love and the emancipation of women, appealing to author-translators with corresponding ideological agendas—and life experiences. The subjective narrative model in the poem (humorous digressions, recollections, calls to “off-screen” addressees, the poetics of a biographical riddle) offered translators (and their muses and co-authors) an invitation to personalize the text in different historical and cultural periods.

 

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Russian Realism of the 19th Century: Society, Knowledge, Narrative.
Edited by M. Vaysman, A. Vdovin, I. Kliger, K. Ospovat

Русский реализм XIX века: Общество, знание, повествование. Сборник статей; под ред. М. Вайсман, А. Вдовина, И. Клигера, К. Осповата.

Compromised by the conflicted legacy of Soviet literary criticism, research on Russian realism almost came to a stand-still after 1991. New methodologies and cutting edge critical theories, eagerly explored in the fields studying other periods of Russian culture, have not influenced studies of 19th-century Russian literature as much – until very recently. The recently published collection of essays that the speakers (editors of this volume) will discuss -following three international conferences on the same topic – attempts to answer several questions: How might we study Russian realism today? How did Russian genre models differ from Western European models? How did science and political economy influence Russian prose in this era? Why, given the period’s radical views on the “woman question,” did the role of women writers in the development of Russian realism remain largely unacknowledged? Restarting a discussion of Russian realism as the most important “modeling system” of a particular stage of modernity, the volume examines Russian realism through the prism of social imaginaries, economics, 19th-century epistemology, and mimetic theory, offering readers a wide range of contemporary scholarly approaches to the subject.

Научная дискуссия о русском реализме, скомпрометированная советским литературоведением, прервалась в постсоветскую эпоху. В результате модернизация научного языка и адаптация новых академических трендов не затронули историю русской литературы XIX века. Авторы сборника, составленного по следам трех международных конференций, пытаются ответить на вопросы: как можно изучать реализм сегодня? Чем русские жанровые модели отличались от западноевропейских? Как наука и политэкономия влияли на прозу русских классиков? Почему, при всей радикальности взглядов на «женский вопрос», роль женщин-писательниц в развитии русского реализма оставалась весьма ограниченной? Возобновляя дискуссию о русском реализме как важнейшей «моделирующей системе» определенного этапа модерности, авторы рассматривают его сквозь призму социального воображаемого, экономики, эпистемологии XIX века и теории мимесиса, тем самым предлагая читателю широкий диапазон современных научных подходов к проблеме.

Featuring: Ilya Kliger (New York University), Kirill Ospovat (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Margarita Vaysman (St. Andrews), Alexei Vdovin (Moscow Higher School of Economics)

Moderators: Mikhail Makeev (Moscow State University) and Hilde Hoogenboom (Arizona State University)

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Professor Berman’s talk explores how family structure shaped plot in the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Existing studies of family and plot—based largely on the English novel—assume a conservative function for the family, driven by the genealogical imperative (plots lead to marriages that will produce heirs). The Russian novel dismantles this assumption. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources and close reading of over 100 novels (roughly 50 Russian and 50 English), Berman argues that the English and Russians had fundamentally different conceptions of what the family was and that this shaped the way they plotted consanguineal relations, courtship/marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. The talk will focus on Russia’s alternative kinship model that pushed beyond standard bio-legal conceptions of family, instead embracing intentional kin. This expansive, inclusive model—standing in sharp opposition to the English obsession with lineage and descent—created new “messier” family plots and contributed to the Russian novel’s famed open-endedness and breaking of generic conventions.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

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If there were ever a group that might be described as the silent majority, it is the barely literate women who went to confession in the Russian empire. Although Orthodox Christians of both sexes and all ages above seven were required to do this at least once a year, women in Russia (as elsewhere in Europe) tended to go more often than men.

In theory the sacrament of penance was auricular and private. However—unusually—women in the Russian empire also produced both written confessions and other texts relating to confession. Unlike male Russian writers, who described govienie (the entire process of preparing for confession and communion) in other ways—Pushkin and Ogarev’s satirical verse, Natasha Rostova in War and Peace, Stavrogin in Besy—women turned the experience of confession into a form of mostly private literary production rather than public declamation or social critique. Their texts include written confessions, examinations of conscience, texts aimed at children preparing for the all-important first confession, and representations of confession in works of fiction.

Most Russian women tended to approach their confession-related written production in an ‘auxiliary’ spirit, as preparation for a spoken confession. Because of this, some of their texts were original, some followed templates produced by the Russian Orthodox Church, and some were copied extracts from devotional classics. All of them raise complicated issues of originality, quotation, authorship, and narrative voice (encountered by such later Russian-language women writers as Sof’ia Fedorchenko or Svetlana Aleksievich). This talk will examine several confessions written to the charismatic Father John of Kronstadt, possible templates, and literary representations.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

Participants can access preliminary materials in advance of the event.

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Against the backdrop of photographic practices in the wider Caucasus region, this presentation looks to address theoretical and methodological specifics of the history of photography in imperial times and to map some of the networks that provided the conceptual and practical basis for the production, circulation and reception of photographic images. As the project in progress puts an emphasis on shared histories and the entanglement of photographic practices across imperial borders rather than on the aesthetic qualities of single frames, Professor Dominik Gutmeyr will talk about the circulation of knowledge that lay behind the introduction of photography into the region, about the role of religion in the adoption of photography, and about the impact of industrial innovation on the development of local visual cultures.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here. 

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This presentation is dedicated to Alexander Druzhinin’s spectacularly influential epistolary novella Polin’ka Saks, published at the end of 1847 in Sovremennik.  Professor Ilya Kliger will attempt an analysis of Polinka Saks with an eye to the wider context of Russian and Western domestic fiction and with special attention to a small corpus of texts – translated and original, literary, belletristic, and scholarly – published the same year in the same journal.  Most broadly at stake is the distinctiveness of Russian scenarios of domestic government – the management and regulation of women’s vitality and desire – vis-à-vis their Western European counterparts.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

Click here for the event video!

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Join us for another 19v seminar!

Against the backdrop of photographic practices in the wider Caucasus region, this presentation looks to address theoretical and methodological specifics of the history of photography in imperial times and to map some of the networks that provided the conceptual and practical basis for the production, circulation and reception of photographic images. As the project in progress puts an emphasis on shared histories and the entanglement of photographic practices across imperial borders rather than on the aesthetic qualities of single frames, Professor Gutmeyr will talk about the circulation of knowledge that lay behind the introduction of photography into the region, about the role of religion in the adoption of photography, and about the impact of industrial innovation on the development of local visual cultures.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

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In this lecture, Professor Ani Kokobobo traces a new minority masculinity in Tolstoy’s late narratives after the author denounces sexuality in works like The Kreutzer Sonata. If typical Tolstoyan “seeker” characters, like Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, and Konstantin Levin were always social misfits who did not fit within societal roles and sought a sphere outside of society for their own mental growth and development, a number of Tolstoy’s later characters take matters further and fully embrace the outsider status. In an article on Tolstoy’s translation of the gospels, Hugh McLean sets up a contrast between the image of Christ that Tolstoy constructs, and another historical character and warrior, Hadji Murat, arguing that the Russian author was ultimately far more comfortable with a more “red-blooded” and “macho” hero. Professor Kokobobo considers several late narratives and argue that as different as some of Tolstoy’s later male figures might be, many seek lives outside the sexual economy and societal institutions, while Tsar Nicholas I, one of the most hated figures in Tolstoy’s later writings, typifies the rottenness of hegemonic masculinity for the late author – as an unapologetic lecher and murderer who relies on violent institutions for his power. Bringing Tolstoy into dialogue with contemporary masculinity theory, Professor Kokobobo argue that Tolstoy’s new masculinity in this later period seeks to move beyond this power- and sex-driven hegemonic model to embrace the masculinity model typified by Christ.

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.

Click here for a video recording of this event.

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The endings of (realist) novels are just as difficult as their beginnings; although the novels pretend that beginnings as well as endings are logical parts of a narrative, starting with the birth of a person or the meeting two future lovers and ending with either death or marriage, they are, mostly, contingent. While the beginning is difficult because it has to be original (“desire is always there at the beginning of narrative,” Peter Brooks writes), the ending is complicated because it often does not follow from the narrative but forces it to stop. For Russian realist novels the ending is especially trying: not only do the novels have the task to depict life itself, but also they are the scene for philosophical, theological and political debates. In her talk, Professor Schamma Schahadat will try to explain why Russian realist authors have such a hard time tying up their narrations, why they defer their endings, change them and add afterwords until they can finally put a full stop after hundreds and hundreds of pages.

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting.

Click here for a recap of the event!

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Vasilii Polenov and Ilia Repin’s three-year sojourn in Paris from 1873 to 1876 as pensioners of the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts has long been the subject of considerable interest among Russian and Western scholars alike. To date, most investigations into this topic have centered on their formative encounter with the French avant-garde, and especially the Impressionists, and their stylistic experimentations with plein air painting. However, less attention has been paid to their sustained engagement with European Salon painting—and especially the Orientalist genre—and the ways in which it had made a lasting impact on their artistic praxis both conceptually and materially. Accordingly, this presentation will focus on the series of paintings Polenov and Repin had produced in Paris which depicted ethnically and racially diverse subjects and the ways in which these works were received in Russia upon their return from France. It will probe a number of complex topics such as Russian exceptionalism, imperialist aesthetics, and nationalist versus cosmopolitan sensibilities.

Watch the event recap on YouTube here.

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This virtual discussion will focus on new research in gothic studies in 19th-century Russian literature. The gothic tradition exercised significant influence on the history of Russian literature and culture, but is frequently critically overlooked in our discipline. Valeria Sobol (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Katherine Bowers (U of British Columbia) will speak on their books on the subject, Haunted Empire: Gothic and the Russian Imperial Uncanny (Northern Illinois University Press/Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2020) and Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic (University of Toronto Press, expected 2021). Haunted Empire argues that gothic tropes, prevalent in the depictions of the imperial borderlands in Russian Romantic literature, enact deep historical and cultural tensions that arise from Russia’s idiosyncratic imperial experience. In Writing Fear, Bowers maps out the way that Russian realist writers utilized European gothic tropes, narrative devices, and themes in their writing in order to expose and engage with cultural, social and political anxieties throughout the long nineteenth century. The session will include a brief introduction to gothic in Russia and the state of the field today, talks by both Sobol and Bowers focused on their books, a concluding discussion about the stakes of gothic studies for Russian literary studies, and an audience Q&A period.

Watch the event recap on YouTube here.

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In this talk, Colleen Lucey will give a brief overview of her forthcoming book, Love for Sale: Representing Prostitution in Imperial Russia, before presenting her chapter on the figure of the dowerless bride in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture. She will be joined by her discussant, Katherine Pickering Antonova. Evocative of women’s objectification and their secondary social status, dowerless brides embodied the commodification of marriage and the belief every woman could be purchased. To heighten the magnitude of the issue, writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Avdotia Panaeva, and Alexander Ostrovsky borrowed the metaphor of prostitution to explain the threat the commodification of marriage posed to the Russian family, and by extension the nation. Marriage, they argued, should not mirror the relationship between prostitute and client, whereby men “purchase” their wives in matrimony. Genre painters of the period, particularly Pavel Fedotov and Nikolai Shilder used their canvases to amplify fears that dowerless brides were easy prey to conniving procuresses or mercenary grooms. But as fiction and art depicted the dowerless bride as a social victim, a tension emerged regarding how much agency should be granted to women in matters of the heart, the home and, most importantly, the household budget.

 

Watch the event recap on YouTube here.

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This talk will introduce Vadim Shneyder’s forthcoming book, Russia’s Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov (Northwestern University Press, 2020), an examination of how the Russian realist literary tradition responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During the years of the Russian Empire’s tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. How to write characters whose business success depends on avoiding scandal and conflict? How to describe the interior of a factory, whose machines overwhelm the senses? How to give sensuous form to money, which seems to circulate in the very air? How could writers make sense of a whole complex of changes—cultural and social, economic and ethical, observed and anticipated—that characterized the last decades of the nineteenth century? How, finally, did the Russian realist novel help make the economy a thing that could be thought? As an illustration of some of the book’s guiding questions, this talk will examine one of the most famous scenes in Russian literature—Levin’s mowing scene in Anna Karenina—in light of the poetics of agricultural and industrial labor in Russian realist literature.

 

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This week, Allison Leigh will describe the overall scope of her forthcoming book, Picturing Russia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting, which investigates the discontent that arose among Russian men as they tried to negotiate the paradoxical prescriptions for masculinity that characterized the period. Professor Leigh will be joined by a discussant, Molly Brunson of Yale University.

Picturing Russia’s Men takes a vital new approach to this topic by pairing close readings of paintings with some of the first translations of Russian artists’ writings. Dr. Leigh will also share an excerpt from one of the book’s chapters which focuses on the painter Alexander Ivanov. His unusual depiction of a mythological subject in a painting entitled Apollo, Hyacinthus, and Cypress, Playing Music and Singing (1831-34, unfinished) serves as a case study for exploring the homoeroticism and androgyny latent in the neoclassical style. While the painting is saturated with the ideals of antiquity which characterized the nude académies he made as a student at the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, it is also an artwork that exceeds the propriety of the classical style. Exploring its development lends insight into the artist’s sexuality and, on a larger level, the way men’s erotic proclivities were implicated in the establishment of their masculinity in the nineteenth century.

 

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

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We are excited to announce the launch of the 19v Seminar Series! Please join us on Zoom Wednesday, June 24 at 12 pm EST, for the first seminar: an interdisciplinary roundtable on “What Is The 19th Century?” with panelists Alex Martin (University of Notre Dame), Rosalind Polly Blakesley (Cambridge), and Luba Golburt (Berkeley). The panel will be moderated by Sara Dickinson (Università di Genova).

This event kicks off the 19v Seminar Series with reflections on what our object of study really is: When does the century begin and when does it end? Where can or should lines be drawn or erased between centuries? And are the answers to these questions different for different disciplines? Our speakers represent perspectives from the fields of history, art history, and literary studies.

 

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

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Please join us via Zoom on June 3^rd for an introduction to 19v, a new collective aimed at bringing together scholars who work on 19^th-century Russian culture, literature, and the arts! The event will feature scholarly presentations by 19v collaborators followed by an open discussion where all participants will be invited to explore avenues for further collaboration.

NYU Professor Anne Lounsbery will open discussion by explaining the motivation behind the project and laying out the initiatives that 19v has planned for the coming year—blog posts, lecture series, and reading groups, all open to anyone interested in participating. To illustrate how we hope to encourage collaboration while also supporting individual scholars, a few members of the group will talk about their current projects and how they intersect with 19v: Helen Stuhr-Rommereim (PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania) will speak about a reading group that she and others are organizing on “minor” writers; Professor Margaret Samu (Parsons School of Design) will discuss her work on the female nude in Russian art and design and its relation to current issues in the field; Professor Ani Kokobobo (University of Kansas) will discuss gender and its frequent, if not always intentional, marginalization in 19^th-century Russian studies; and Professor Bella Grigoryan (University of Pittsburgh) will speak about the sources and methods of our field, with particular attention to the periodical (journal and newspaper) as a cultural form and material object that shapes the worlds it traverses. To conclude, NYU Professor Ilya Kliger will moderate a question-and-answer and brainstorming session inviting everyone present to suggest avenues for further collaboration.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

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