This dissertation examines key texts from the intermediate and mature periods of Vasily Grossman’s career in order to determine the relationship between his evolving philosophy and the poetics that characterize his writing. While significant critique has been applied to the nature of Grossman’s philosophy, comparatively less has looked at the aesthetic and technical aspects of his writing itself; still less to the connection between Grossman’s abstract concepts and his accomplished texts. My effort has been to bridge the gap between these two areas of inquiry and to ascertain the quality of their tightly intertwined and complex relationship. I analyze four of Grossman’s key texts in depth, with reference to several other writings. Of the primary texts considered in my study, two are essays from the writer’s intermediate period: “The Hell of Treblinka” («Треблинский ад») and “The Sistine Madonna” («Сикстинская мадонна»);” of the two longer works, one is Grossman’s multi-volume masterpiece novel Life and Fate (Жизнь и судьба) and the other is his novella (повесть) and final fictional work Everything Flows (Все течет). These texts were chosen for their aptness at demonstrating key features of Grossman’s prosody and philosophical thinking, both those that remained constant and those that evolved over time. The following study establishes that Grossman’s writing itself, by means of the formal structures he employs throughout his works, constitutes the embodiment and realization of his ethics. Specifically, the following work considers modes of movement and generation in Grossman’s writing that speak to the value he places on the individual human experience.

Although nothing in either the theorist’s or the author’s oeuvre indicates one’s direct awareness of the other, Bakhtin and Nabokov both displayed a surprisingly similar concern for the interrelationship between ethics and literary aesthetics. This shared concern was no doubt shaped by Bakhtin and Nabokov’s common Silver Age background, which was rife with political, artistic and theological discourses regarding the nature of artistic creation, the created nature of man, and man’s ability to continue the process of self-creation. Both Bakhtin and Nabokov thus elaborated on the ethical dynamic between self and other within a commonly held, deeply aestheticized view of life that regards perception and representation of the other as the artistic creation of that other. Bakhtin and Nabokov’s conceptual parallel is further extended by the fact that both of their elaborations of this dynamic are specific responses to the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The purpose of this dissertation is, then, to explore further the conceptual convergences and antagonisms inherent in the seemingly similar aestheticized ethics of Bakhtin and Nabokov. Particular attention is paid to the author and theorist’s intellectual influences, especially with regards to Nabokov, since only a proper intellectual contextualization of Bakhtin and Nabokov’s allusively language will allow us a meaningful interpretation of their accounts of aesthetics and ethics.