In Yuz Aleshkovsky's prose, the writer creates the literary image of the Soviet Union's 'new man' and his reflection on Soviet history. Representing the third wave of Russian Literature in immigration, Aleshkovsky published his samizdat works in the West. This thesis includes an in-depth coverage of three Aleshkovsky novels: The Hand and Kangaroo written in the Soviet Union and circulated in the underground, and A Ring in a Case, a work compiled and published in the United States which covers the intra-collapse era of the Soviet Regime. The goal of this argument is to explore through the prism of Bakhtin's carnival, Aleshkovsky's literary image of the 'new-man' versus the ordinary man as an alternative to the literary images of socialist realism; and discuss the depictions of history and historical figures as Aleshkovsky's post-modern response to the state-mandated socialist-realist aesthetic. In Aeshkovky's works the main protagonists suffer from the complication of sexual impotence. This artistic method provides Aleshkovsky the necessary framework to present his treatment of the theme of masculinity and how it was affected by the Soviet experiment, contrasting the 'new-man' with who is referred to as either a 'regular' or ordinary man. To depict the Soviet reality in which the 'new-man' lives, Aleshkovsky portrays Soviet history using mennipean satire. This thesis explicates Aleshkovsky's image of Soviet history by applying Mikhail Bakhtin's characteristics of the mennipea. This methodology illuminates how Aleshkovsky renders history as carnival, creating the inverted paradigm in which the grotesque and absurd allow the reader a truer depiction of the Soviet reality than any official history. Aleshkovsky's use of demonic imagery works to contradict the socialism and radicalism of the revolutionaries in his works. Those who created the Soviet state did so in service of the Ideal, Truth, and Purpose. They believed that their ends would justify their means. Portraying those who worked for the good of the people as demonic is the complete reversal of the official Party line, adding to Aleshkovsky's alternative yet parallel world omnipresent in his works. The absurdist depiction of the revolutionaries underscores Aleshkovsky's aversion to fanatical ideology, notably socialism. The man of the new type, being so possessed by the idea of historical necessity is concerned not with his own fate but the fate of the collective, and if the new-man is not concerned with his own fate how could he be with that of another? The men lack any sense of reason; unable to think for themselves, they believe to sit in prison is their duty in the building of socialism. To accomplish his rejection of the effects of communism on society and history within the Soviet Union and then the emerging Russian state, Aleshkovsky employs the literary devices of skaz and constructs a poetic, carnivalesque world in which the absurd and grotesque are more realistic depictions than any official history. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Fall Semester 2018. / November 16, 2018. / absurd, Aleshkovsky, A Ring in a Case, Bakhtin, Kangaroo, The Hand / Includes bibliographical references. / Nina Efimov, Professor Directing Thesis; Lisa Wakamiya, Committee Member; Robert Romanchuk, Committee Member.

This dissertation argues that, during the last three decades of the nineteenth-century, at a time when, influenced by Mikhail Bakunin's philosophies of destruction, Russian revolutionaries called for the annihilation of tsarist Russia, realist novelists turned to the grotesque mode. Whereas works written by Ivan Turgenev, Sergei Aksakov, Ivan Goncharov, and Tolstoy in the 1850s and 1860s had portrayed Russia in positive terms through the lens of an idyllic countryside, three late realist novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons (1872), Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Golovlevs (1875-1881), and Lev Tolstoy's Resurrection (1899), used the grotesque to cast a negative look at that same world. I base my definition of the grotesque on studies by Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World) and Wolfgang Kayser (The Grotesque in Art and Literature), which describe the grotesque as an estrangement of the familiar. Kayser argues that the grotesque distorts the world as we know it; Bakhtin supplements this definition by suggesting that grotesque estrangement leads to a degradation of the abstract and spiritual to the level of physicality and the body. Working with these definitions I argue that Dostoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Tolstoy used devices associated with earlier realism to develop their aesthetic of the grotesque and to depict Russian reality in a grotesque mode. They did not simply revive the earlier Gogolian grotesque, but created a new grotesque that estranged traditional idealizing modes of depicting life on the Russian country estate. In these late realist novels Russian reality is populated by despiritualized, grotesque beings. I set the stage for this project through an analysis of the conceptualist Vladimir Sorokin's Roman (1994), in which he simulates the pastoral idyll of the Russian countryside and then deforms and destroys it through grotesque violence. Like the nineteenth-century novelists, Sorokin reacts against the nostalgic impulse that has prevailed in Russian attitudes toward the past.

This dissertation examines a selectively multi-generic set of texts (mainstream periodicals, advice literature and fiction) that responded to a cultural need to provide normative models for the Russian nobleman's domestic life and self, following the 1762 Manifesto that freed the gentry from obligatory state service. The material suggests that a prominent strain in the Russian novelistic tradition that took the provincial landowner as a central object of representation developed in the course of a series of encounters between prescriptive and creative literatures. In chapter one, the cross-pollination between generically diverse segments of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century print culture (namely, Andrei Bolotov's agricultural advice and Nikolai Novikov's satirical and Nikolai Karamzin's mainstream journalism) is read as crucial for the formation of a proto-novelistic prose idiom for the representation of the nobleman in the provinces. In chapter two, the growing professionalization and concomitant commercialization of Russian letters is treated as a prominent factor in the polemical relations between Faddei Bulgarin and Nikolai Gogol. I suggest that prescriptive literature about farming and journalistic responses to it are a significant component in the intertextual links between Bulgarin's Ivan Vyzhigin and Gogol's Dead Souls. In chapter three, Ivan Goncharov's oeuvre is read as a self-conscious attempt to arrive at the novelistic representation of a successful province-bound nobleman. His novelistic trilogy--A Common Story (Obyknovennaia istoriia), Oblomov and The Precipice (Obryv)--is situated vis-à-vis a growing corpus of Russian domestic advice literature to suggest that Goncharov's prose re-works the extra-literary material. In broad terms, the study may be viewed in two, mutually supplementary, ways as (1) a "thick description" of three moments in the formation of novelistic gentry selves understood to be always in dialogue with prescriptive texts that sought to provide a normative discourse about a productive noble private life in the provinces and (2) a re-appraisal of writers long considered central to the establishment of the Russian novelistic tradition, with especially close attention paid to how these foundational figures navigated a multi-generic field of cultural production.

After discussing variant approaches to translation and the characteristics of Nikolai Leskov's prose, the study analyses the language in excerpts selected from Leskov's novel-length chronicle, Soboryane. The samples illustrate the range of Leskov's prose, including straight exposition, archaic language, colloquial language, and the skaz or frame story. Existing translations of these passages in English, French and German are analyzed and suggestions made for translations into English that capture as much as possible of the feel and nuance of the Russian original. The study concludes with a discussion of what is lost in the translation of language in the idiosyncratic style of a writer like Leskov.

This dissertation characterizes the particular brands of irony at work in Gogol's fiction over the course of his career and analyzes how they are generated, how they act upon readers, and how they relate to the broader aesthetic and ideological project to which Gogol ultimately dedicated himself - namely, his attempt to rid Russian literary efforts of their dependence upon narrative as their organizing principle. This dissertation also argues that Gogol's use of irony is so extreme in form that it provides an excellent case study for an evaluation of the nature of irony itself. Thus, Gogol's fiction is analyzed with an eye toward how the concept of irony illuminates the structure and function of his prose, and conversely, how the operations of that prose challenge received notions of how irony functions in a literary work. Taking as a starting point Wayne Booth's notion that the perception of irony is dependent upon the image of the narrator, the first part of this dissertation traces the development of the Gogolian narrator in chronological fashion, tracing a distinct evolutionary pattern. Through close readings of the short stories contained in Volume I (1831) and Volume II (1832) of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka -- "The Fair at Sorochintsy," "St. John's Eve," "A May Night, or the Drowned Maiden, "The Lost Letter," "Christmas Eve," "A Terrible Vengeance," "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Auntie," and "A Bewitched Place" - the first stage of that evolution is mapped out. Here Gogol's initial narrators challenge our innate tendency to assume that one integrated speaker is responsible for a given tale, but ultimately, they accommodate that tendency by revealing themselves as convincing character-narrators with unorthodox, but perceptible, profiles. As a result, these works constitute a series of "ironic portraits." By the time Gogol has reached the apex of his creative powers in the latter half of the 1830s he learns to manipulate the various discourses he includes in his tales such that we sense the lurking presence of Gogol himself (as implied author). Once we recognize this we interpret the massive abrogations of narrative sense he weaves through his tales as being intended by the "speaker." The result is the emergence of "ironic discourse." This transition is illustrated through close readings of the "Petersburg Stories" -- "Nevsky Prospect" (1835), "The Nose" (1836), and "The Overcoat" (1842). The place of Mirgorod (1835) as an anomalous experiment in "sincere" prose forms is also addressed. By the time of the publication of the first volume of Dead Souls (1842), ironic discourse allowed Gogol to both mock the expectations his readers brought (and continue to bring) to the experience of reading a "story" and provide a structure that would let them in on the joke. According to Michael Kaufer, solidarity is built by the very process through with the reader recognizes that the author is "being ironic." In recognizing that there is irony at work, the reader feels himself part of a select few, at one with the author, and essentially "in the know," even if the butt of the literary joke is the reader himself. The final part of this dissertation considers the implications of a brand of irony that seems resistant to received notions of irony that posit it as a means of generating some form of resultant meaning. Gogol's use of irony is significant not in terms of what it means, but in terms of what it does to the reader. Donald Davidson's formulation of the concept of metaphor is invoked as a useful means of re-characterizing irony. According to Davidson, a metaphor enjoins the reader to view seemingly disparate things comparatively, to hold the disparate elements in his or her field of vision. As Gogol demonstrates, an ironic utterance enjoins the reader to view the textual and extra-textual incongruities the utterance presents. The qualitative nature of metaphoric vision and of ironic vision are different, but both depend on the "use" of language, and not upon the development of resultant meaning. Irony, like metaphor, is not concerned with what an author eventually means beyond what is literally said, but how he or she means what is literally said and what this does to the reader in terms of his or her relationship to the text.

The library of existing scholarship on Vladimir Nabokov circles uncomfortably around his annotated translation Eugene Onegin (1964) and late English-language novel Ada, or Ardor (1969). This dissertation juxtaposes Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin (1825-32) with Nabokov's two most controversial monuments and investigates Nabokov's ambitions to enter a canon of Western masterpieces, re-imagined with Russian literature as a central strain. I interrogate the implied trajectory for Russian belles lettres, culminating unexpectedly in a novel written in English and after fifty years of emigration. My subject is Nabokov, but I use this hermetic author to raise broader questions of cultural borrowing, transnational literatures, and struggles with rival canons and media. Chapter One examines Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, the foundation stone of the Russian canon and a meta-literary fable. Untimely characters pursue one another and the latest Paris and London fashions in a text that performs and portrays anxieties of cultural borrowing and Russia's position vis-à-vis the West. Fears of marginalization are often expressed in terms of time: I use Pascale Casanova's World Republic of Letters to suggest a global context for the "belated" provinces and fashion-setting centers of cultural capital. Chapter Two argues that Nabokov's Eugene Onegin, three-quarters provocation to one-quarter translation, focuses on the Russian poet and his European sources. Nabokov reads Onegin as a masterpiece of theft and adaptation: the lengthy notes painstakingly examine precedents, especially in Byron and Chateaubriand, and evaluate for originality by comparison. When does Pushkin engage in derivative "native" imitations, and when in subtle and brilliant parody? Chapter Three concludes that Nabokov attempts his own timeless masterpiece with Ada, or Ardor. Planet Antiterra, Nabokov's personal "world republic of letters," transplants and conflates his beloved literatures. To create this Russo-Franco-Anglophone world, Ada lifts lines, characters, and fabula from Onegin but also from works by Byron and Chateaubriand. A pattern emerges of great English, French, and Russian triads; it repeats more faintly with Dickens, Flaubert, and Tolstoy (Nabokov hoped one day to translate Anna Karenina); but the most fraught iteration is Joyce, Proust, and Nabokov himself. Chapter Four looks at traces of Joyce and Proust in Ada. The two modernists serve as signs by which great readers recognize one another, as indexes to the "real" and the beautiful, and as carriers of tradition; but Ada subsumes its rivals through imitation and parody. However, the incestuous lovers Ada and Van Veen, heirs to the greatest literary traditions in the world, die childless. Is Ada a dead end, Nabokov's Finnegans Wake? Or can masterpieces interbreed indefinitely? Chapter Five examines Ada in the context of its working title, The Texture of Time. Van is a scholar of Henri Bergson, of the duration of the past into the present, and of spatial metaphors for time. Van aspires to an eternal present, but the one-way time of ordinary mortality threatens to take over the narrative. The structure of the novel mimics Zeno's paradox, famously refuted by the French philosopher: Part Two is roughly half the size of Part One, and so on. The arrow (Ardis in Greek, the name of the Veens' lost paradise) speeds towards the final target, but the Veens aim for immortality and to die into their book. Chapter Six turns to the visual arts. Nabokov's novel reads like a gallery, with Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights in pride of place. Ada animates the Old Masters, but there are also no fewer than three film adaptations depicted in the novel, betraying an ongoing struggle between the media (and echoing Stanley Kubrick and Nabokov's skirmishes over Lolita the film). If it is to survive beyond inbreeding with diminishing results, the novel form must subsume more than its own recent greats. I conclude with Nabokov as an image in the work of contemporary novelists, a source and a transcultural precursor to a new generation of international writers.

This dissertation challenges dominant perceptions of literary socialist realism by demonstrating how works of official Soviet literature enjoy more scope for individuality and innovation than is commonly acknowledged by structuralist or dissident readings. It examines how three Stalin Prize-winning novels use the material of recent history, their predecessor works, the tropes and genres of the Soviet literary system, and allegorical reading to comment on Stalinist society, including such concerns as love, the legitimacy of the state, generational conflict, and Bolshevik management techniques. It traces the textual history of Aleksandr Fadeev's wartime conspiracy novel Young Guard, showing that revision demanded by the state can boost a work's legitimacy, and suggesting that the novel may not always be the most important version of a narrative when alternative versions exist, especially film. It argues that the first version of a Stalinist novel generally demonstrates more authorial individuality and engagement with Soviet Reality than the later versions that give the impression of homogeneity to Soviet literature. Semen Babaevskii's agricultural production novel Bearer of the Golden Star, one of the chief targets of Thaw critics, engages the Stalinist literary convention of the positive hero by thematizing the concept of the hero and showing how society's reaction to that status may impeach its ability to enable the rest of its citizenry to carry out post-war reconstruction. Vera Panova's Radiant Shore circumvents the constraints of the doctrine of conflictlessness by delving into the world of a child, but also by creating an allegory that links animal husbandry, Soviet literary history, and Communist management techniques.

This study investigates how Turkestan generally and Turkmenia more specifically were represented in Russian-language film and literature in the early Soviet period. By analyzing the work of writers and filmmakers as well as the ideological and artistic constraints that they faced, I explore not only depictions of these spaces, but also the biographies of several of their key depicters, delving into the historical circumstances in which given texts were produced and the relationship between these texts and the larger artistic fields into which they were released. The study opens with a discussion of texts by "outsiders" who positioned Turkmenia as a space worthy of exploration between 1921 and 1927. Chapter One examines two essay collections by the Eurasianists - Iskhod k vostoku. Predchuvstviia i sversheniia. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (Exit to the East: Forebodings and Events: An Affirmation of the Eurasians, 1921) and Na putiakh. Utverzhdenie evraziitsev (On the Way: An Affirmation of the Eurasians, 1922) - as well as Dziga Vertov's documentary film Shestaia chast' mira (One Sixth of the World, 1926) and two literary works by Nikolai Tikhonov, a "fellow traveler" who passed through Turkmenistan in the mid-1920s. Despite the differences in the approaches of the Eurasianists, Vertov, and Tikhonov, I argue, all of these men envisioned Turkmenia as an undelimited space within a larger landmass that was worthy of further exploration. In Chapter Two, I discuss how "outsider" writers and filmmakers were inscribed into the Soviet project of building socialism in Turkestan during the First Five-Year Plan. First, I turn my attention to two texts about the construction of the 1,400-kilometer Turksib railway, the flagship construction project for Central Asia in the First-Five-Year-Plan era: Viktor Turin's documentary film Turksib (1929) and Viktor Shklovsky's related children's book Turksib (1930). In my analysis of these works, I discuss how the two texts position their authors as facilitators of modernization and as mediators between the Soviet periphery and the center. Next, I discuss the first literary "shock brigade" sent to Central Asia, in 1930, and analyze the contributions made by Tikhonov and his fellow Serapion Brother Vsevolod Ivanov to the 1932 almanac Turkmenistan vesnoi (Turkmenistan in the Spring). I suggest that Tikhonov adapted to his new roles as an official representative of Soviet Russian literature and a witness to socialist construction with special ease, while Ivanov displayed deep ambivalence about taking on new, more institutionalized responsibilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Central Asian periphery. Chapter Three takes up the shift in official Soviet poetics toward "insider iconographers" and the changing practices of writers and filmmakers visiting Turkestan during the Second Five-Year Plan. First, I discuss Vertov's film Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs about Lenin, 1934), which I claim is paradigmatic for the turn toward native voices that characterized official Soviet culture in 1933 and 1934. Next, I describe the work of the national commissions that were set up in Moscow in advance of the first All-Union Writers' Congress in 1934. These commissions, I suggest, helped establish new conventions for the representation of space in Turkestan, pushing writers and other artists to show the region's constituent republics as landscapes mastered by the local populations. I then analyze the almanac one of these commissions produced, Aiding-Giunler: Al'manakh k desiatiletiiu Turkmenistana, 1924-1934 (Aiding-Giunler: The Almanac for the Tenth Anniversary of Turkmenistan, 1924-1934). In a discussion that centers on Petr Skosyrev's novella Oazis (Oasis), Grigorii Sannikov's poem cycle "Peski i rozy" ("Sands and Roses"), and Oraz Tash-Nazarov's translated poem Bairam-Ali, I argue that the volume bears traces of the moves toward "native voices" and an iconography that equates Turkmenistan with the concept of a transformed, flourishing desert. Chapter Four examines "insider iconography" from a different perspective. Instead of focusing on texts that illustrate the paradigm in its purest form, I look at a set of literary works that not only accommodated it, but also refracted it. Specifically, I read Platonov's "Turkmenia cycle" as an outgrowth of the kind of landscape production that was being practiced by the national commission for Turkmenistan and other cultural producers in the mid-1930s. Along with Platonov's letters and journal entries from the period, this cycle, I argue, suggests that cultural producers operating in the Soviet Union were well aware of the conventions that were developing for the representation of Turkmenistan. At the same time, I maintain, the cycle represents a unique artistic achievement, one that not only encapsulates but also transcends the cultural trends that were dominant when it was produced. As a whole, the dissertation shows how the space of Turkmenia was gradually transformed into Soviet landscapes and places in Russian-language literature and film; how the rise of high Stalinism affected the production of texts about the region, redirecting responsibility for its representation to insider iconographers and those willing to pose as such; and how Platonov can be considered as both a practitioner and an articulate critic of the paradigm I call "insider iconography." I argue that between 1921 and 1935: 1) Turkestan and the rest of Central Asia became clearly visible in Russian-language cultural products for the first time; 2) the signifier "Turkmenistan" began to take on a specific meaning in the Soviet ideological system; 3) there was a paradigm shift in the dominant strategy of the Soviet "East's" representation in officially sanctioned texts, as "insiders'" views and simulacra of them became increasingly valued; and 4) Platonov reflected on this shift in his "Turkmenia cycle," which can be read as the apotheosis of "insider iconography."

This dissertation examines a famous formal peculiarity of nineteenth-century Russian novels: the scores upon scores of characters they embrace. Drawing on terminology developed by Alex Woloch--"character space" and "character system"--I ask how Russian writers use their huge, unwieldy systems of characters to create meaning. In each of the four central chapters I analyze a different "overcrowded" nineteenth-century Russian novel: Gogol's Dead Souls, Part I (1842), Goncharov's Oblomov (1859), Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1875-77), and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). I address questions such as: what artistic purpose do the many superfluous-seeming minor characters in Gogol's, Goncharov's, Tolstoy's, and Dostoevsky's works serve? What effect does their presence have on the structure of the novels themselves? Why was Dostoevsky so worried by the criticism, which he received throughout the 1870s, that he was "overpopulating" his novels? And how did Dostoevsky's own compositional dilemmas inform both the architectonics and the thematics of The Brothers Karamazov? As I argue, there is an increasingly strong sense in nineteenth-century Russian letters that literary characters not only resemble human beings, but even demand of us the same sort of moral obligations that people do. The perceived personhood of literary characters gives particular significance to the narrative decisions realist Russian writers make (such as how to characterize the major vs. minor figures in a novel, and how much or what kind of narrative attention to grant to each), and Gogol, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky take full artistic advantage of it. They use the enormous number of characters who appear on the pages of their novels in order to pose, through the narrative structure of their works, many of the most important moral, social, and political questions that preoccupy them: What, in essence, is a human being? Are we capable of recognizing (or even simply acknowledging) the psychological complexity of the many, many people who surround us? Can we establish universal brotherhood on earth, a harmonious, unified society that truly includes everyone, even the most disruptive and destructive ones?

My dissertation attempts to uncover neglected affinities between two twentieth-century Russian poets often thought to be antithetical to each other, Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilyov. The poetry of Blok and Gumilyov represents the culmination of Russian Symbolism in its quest for unity driven by a sense of irreparable loss. My study traces this search through three broad thematic areas, each of which involves a myth of return to a lost paradise, and all of which intersect with the Christological narrative of the Fall: the Platonic myth of anamnesis, the myth of the Eternal Feminine (dealt with in two consecutive chapters, one on earlier, more mystical treatments, another on later, more secularized versions), and the twin myths of Don Juan and the Prodigal Son. Each of these myths is re-interpreted by the two poets using hybrid forms that combine elements of personal experience or autobiographical myth with pre-existing mythopoetic frameworks or “masks.” I discuss the influences of the Russian and European Romantic tradition on Blok and Gumilyov, and analyze how their work is both a continuation of those traditions and a departure from them. By analyzing their poetry using psychoanalytic theory, I endeavor to reveal previously neglected parallels in these poets’ search to find sacred meaning in a desacralized world.