Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell, 1980. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-210).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 331-352).

Gogol, Dostoevsky and Bely are three Russian novelists, most of whose writings are set in the city of St. Petersburg, and whose feelings for their city were a bizarre mixture of love and hatred. / This dissertation is divided into four chapters, the first of which is a survey of the attitudes held by the literary predecessors and contemporaries of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Bely toward St. Petersburg, and a discussion of the influence of the French feuilletons on the nineteenth-century Russian urban novel. The second chapter is an investigation of the overall image of the city as presented to the reader by the three writers. The predominantly tragic fate of the novelists' heroes is discussed in the third chapter. The final chapter is a study of six major recurrent themes which link the urban novels of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Bely.

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This dissertation argues that Russia’s confrontation with modernity generated a series of sociocultural paradigm crises that gave rise to a modernist grotesque aesthetic tradition, uniting over forty years of artistic production into a coherent literary movement. While close reading the work of Fyodor Sologub (The Petty Demon [Мелкий бес]), Andrei Bely (Petersburg [Петербург]), Evgenii Zamyatin (At World’s End [На куличках]), and Velimir Khlebnikov (“The Crane” [Журавль]), I argue that prerevolutionary modernist writers utilized grotesque modes of representation to depict a world where the former cornerstones of pre-modern Russian identity are fracturing under the pressures of modernity. In contrast to extant scholarship, I argue the 1917 Revolution is not a fundamental break in Russia’s experience of the crisis of modernity, but an extension, and an exacerbation of it. Though discourses of Russian identity formation will be rapidly recodified around the Soviet project, the same underlying grotesque aesthetic devices used by pre-revolutionary authors are taken up by a new generation of Soviet-era modernists. Mikhail Zoshchenko’s parody in Michel Sinyagin (Мишель Синягин) elicits skepticism about yesterday’s unenlightened masses becoming today’s new Tolstoys. Andrei Platonov’s anomalous depictions of the Russian periphery in his Juvenile Sea (Ювенильное море) are still inhabited by monsters, too far from Soviet nodes of power to be assimilated into the national ideological project. And Konstantin Vaginov (in the novel Goat Song [Козлиная песнь]) and Evgenii Shvarts (in the play The Shadow [Тень]) capture the prevalence of superfluous intellectuals with ruptured psyches, frustrated by their unsuccessful attempts to adapt to the new Soviet reality.