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In 1834, Belinsky melodramatically proclaimed, “We have no literature”. He was far from alone; similar sentiments are echoed in numerous critical essays and articles of the 1820s and 30s. These dire assessments of the state of Russian literature reflect the urgent concern the question of national identity had become to intellectuals of the period in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. In the wake of its victory in the Napoleonic War, Russia had won considerable military and political power in Europe. Culturally, however, there was a palpable sense of insecurity vis-a-vis Western Europe. Critics and writers bemoaned the derivative nature of Russian literature, calling for the creation of a national literature that would reflect the unique essence of the Russian national character. The means by which a sense of Russianness or “narodnost’” could be created in literature would become a central concern and topic of debate for writers and critics of the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Folklore was thought to be one way of producing the desired narodnost’. Based on German Romantic theories of nationalism, particularly those of Herder, it was argued that the “folk poetry” of the simple people retained a pure form of the national spirit untainted by foreign influence. It was to this folk poetry that many writers turned in their attempts to create a national literature. There were attempts to create works that imitated folk ballads, songs, and fairy tales as well as incorporating folkloric elements in larger literary works. This period also saw the early efforts to collect authentic examples of folklore from among the people - Pushkin ranks among these early collectors as well as Kireevsky. The practice of introducing elements of folklore into high literature was more complicated, however, than the theory would have one believe. Rather than being the unadulterated voice of the Russian nation taken directly from the people, the “folklore” that appeared in literary texts during this period was more often than not an amalgamation of many influences from both high and low literature and both foreign and native sources. Indeed, it would probably be more productive to think of the folkloric elements of literary texts in this period as being more representations of folklore than as “authentic” folklore. In this dissertation I will examine how writers, through the figure of their various narrators, interact with the folk material of their narratives. My analysis will focus on Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Vladimir Dal. My emphasis will be on analyzing how narrators situate themselves in relation to the folk elements of the text and how their attitudes dramatize the various issues and problems that arise from the gentry writer’s encounter with the cultural other represented by the folk. In my exploration of folklore in Pushkin’s works, I trace the development of his relationship with folklore from one of the earliest of his works, Ruslan and Liudmila, through the middle years of his career, represented by Eugene Onegin, where he makes his most explicit statement about Russian national identity. I conclude with a consideration of his fairytales, which were written towards the end of his artistic career. Through these works, I trace the shift of Pushkin’s narrator’s stance from a position of relative distance from the folkloric elements of his narrative toward a greater sense of identification with his folkloric material. The chapter on Gogol is devoted to the first volume of his Evenings on a Farm Near Dikan’ka. My focus will be on how the figure of the author is splintered and diluted as editor Rudy Panko presents the reader with stories he heard from storytellers in his village, who in turn, heard their stories from still other storytellers, leading to series of nested storytellers. I will also examine how these various storytellers display an array of attitudes toward their folk narratives and how these relationships are enacted in the text. My final chapter is devoted to Vladimir Dahl and his First Five collection of folk tales. I will consider the significance of Dahl’s ideas about the centrality of the language of the common Russian people for the construction of a national identity and how these ideas found expression in his folk tales. As with the other chapters, my focus will be on the figure of the narrator and how his attitudes toward the folkloric elements of his tales form an image of Russian national identity. I hope to show through these explorations how the writer’s engagement with folklore contributed to the image of the Russia and the construction of Russian national identity in nineteenth century literature.

In this dissertation I examine Vladimir Nabokov’s and Gary Shteyngart’s use of family metaphors to manage intersecting Russian and American literary and cultural continuities. Both authors fashion their relationships to literary predecessors and common cultural narratives in terms of disrupted filial relationships, describing both an attachment to the conservative narratives of the nation and a desire to move beyond their rigid structure. I articulate this ambivalence as a productive state of transnational subjecthood that allows these authors to navigate apparently oppositional national identities. Central to this reorientation is a critique of the hierarchical schema of the national canon, which frames literary culture as a determinative series of authoritative relationships. By reimagining these relations as part of a branching network of co-constituting associations, we open the space for transnational subjects to move within and overlap these networks.

This dissertation addresses two questions fundamental to Russian nineteenth-century intellectual history: 1) Why does literature about paranoid psychosis figure so centrally in the nineteenth-century canon? and 2) How did the absence of an epistemological tradition of reflexive self-consciousness influence the development of Russian ideas of subjectivity? I propose that the presence of paranoia in Russian fiction extends beyond the medical or psychoanalytic aspects of character traits or themes. I argue that literary representations of paranoia perform fundamental philosophical gestures and function as "epistemological speech acts." Russian narratives of paranoia (e.g., Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Garshin, Sologub) constitute a means of exploring the operations of a self-reflexive consciousness, familiar in the West through the Cartesian Cogito. In other words, the theme of paranoia in nineteenth-century Russian fiction actively responds to the regnant philosophical discourse and functions as a praxis for the exploration of philosophical questions. However, this is done in an alternative discourse to the propositional language generally favored in philosophical texts; as a result, the philosophical function of the fictions of paranoia has gone unrecognized, and the genre has been "exiled" from philosophical discourse. I argue that Russian texts of paranoid psychosis should be reconceived as venues for the play of the transcendental ego outside social or communal axes. Paranoia emerges as the Jakobsonian “dominant” within these texts, in that it is paranoia that engages with other narrative components and transforms them. Further, as prose fiction, these texts had the discursive and social capacity to resonate and divagate in ways impossible to philosophical texts. Ultimately, these narratives of paranoia are meta-epistemologies that interrogate their own discursive function and status. They raise critical questions not only about the ways in which we represent truth but about the ontological status of truth itself. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

ix, 67 p. / For centuries, Russian writers have stressed the important role the Caucasus played in the Russian Empire. In the last few decades, much attention has been directed at the Caucasians in literary works and movies as a result of the two Chechen wars. This thesis addresses the evolution of the Caucasian theme in Russian literature beginning from the 18th century with a focus on the contemporary representation of the peoples of Caucasus, mainly Chechens, in three works: a Soviet-era movie by Leonid Gaidai, <italic>Kidnapping, Caucasian Style</italic> (1966); Vladimir Makanin's story, <italic>Captive of the Caucasus</italic> (1994) and Viktor Pelevin's story, <italic>Papakhi na bashniakh</italic> (1995). The central research question is to what degree contemporary authors have transformed the image of the Caucasians compared to the Romantic period. Of particular interest is the issue of Russia's self-representation in these works. / Committee in charge: Dr. Susanna Soojung Lim, Chairperson; Dr. Katya Hokanson, Member

Taking its direction from seminal works in the field of play theory, this dissertation examines ludic elements in the textual practices and intellectual community of the Union of Real Art (Ob”edinenie real’nogo iskusstva or OBeRIu). I use the concept of play to elucidate how the group used literature as an unconventional medium for the pursuit of special forms of knowledge and to explore the intimate genre of performance that shaped the association’s collective identity as a group of writers and thinkers. The four chapters that comprise this dissertation each examine one facet of how play shaped the OBeRIu’s shared literary practice. In the first chapter, I contrast the performative strategies of the OBeRIu members (or the oberiuty) with those of the Russian Futurists, demonstrating that the OBeRIu approach to spectacle possesses an ‘existential’ dimension that is quite alien to that of Futurism. I argue that Futurist performance is best characterized by what Hans-Georg Gadamer has called “aesthetic differentiation,” a hermeneutic tradition that foregrounds the autonomy of the artwork while ignoring its rootedness in broader spheres of cultural activity. In contrast, the members of the OBeRIu (the oberiuty), were engaged in what some theorists have called deep play: they showed little interest in the épatage tradition practices by the Futurists and drew no meaningful distinction between art and life.I suggest that performative strategies of the oberiuty can be productively interpreted according to Gadamer’s concept of “self-presentation,” a notion that proves immensely useful for understanding not only the group’s theater, but their written work as well. In my second chapter, I show how the OBeRIu’s playful approach to writing was underscored by their commitment to an epistemic understanding of literature: they believed that literary pursuits constitute a unique form of knowledge. I suggest that the texts produced by the oberity frustrate the boundary that supposedly distinguishes poetry and philosophy. I demonstrate how even a playfully ‘absurd’ text such as Daniil Kharms’s “Blue Notebook No. 10” can be read as a work of philosophy—in this case as a kind of performative refutation of Kantian metaphysics. I suggest that the epistemic register of OBeRIu literature can be likened to what Roger Caillois has called games of ilinx—their texts induce a kind of cognitive vertigo that pushes readers towards forms of knowledge that cannot be properly conceptualized. As a form of epistemic play, OBeRIu texts open onto the world even as they exist ‘beyond’ it, inviting readers to appreciate in poetry what Gadamer called “the joy of knowledge.” In the third chapter of this dissertation I argue that the commitment of the oberiuty to an epistemic understanding of literary art places them squarely at odds with premises fundamental to the theories of Russian Formalism. Indeed, I demonstrate how the OBeRIu as a group deliberately problematize the Formalist concept of literariness. I demonstrate that the poetic episteme of the group took direction from Russian Orthodox theology, particularly the concept of the eikon. The epistemic nature of OBeRIu ‘nonsense’ precludes interpreting their texts as exercises in Shklovskian estrangement. Instead, I suggest that Gadamer’s notion of recognition is invaluable for understanding the work of the oberiuty. Their literary work articulates something and in doing so adds to our understanding of the world. In the final chapter I consider the community of chinari, which constituted a kind of intimate ‘inner circle’ for the OBeRIu that was both more private and longer lived than the Union of Real Art itself. I suggest that the chinari circle can be understood as part of a discernible line of extra-institutional play communities in the history of Russian letters that began with the Arzamas Society of Obscure People. I argue that play was the raison d’être of the chinari community and largely defined the sense they had of themselves as an intellectual community. Considering closely Leonid Lipavsky’s Conversations, a more or less authentic record of the group’s discussions between 1933 and 1934, I suggest that the group used the speech genre of bullshit quite productively—it was both a fun way to explore ideas and, more importantly, a phenomenally effective way to foster their collective bond.

This dissertation chronicles the discourse of sincerity in state published Soviet Russian literature and criticism from Stalin’s death in 1953 to 1970. It presents a means of reading sincerity as a literary device in fiction and poetry that corresponds to an understanding of sincerity as rhetoric. This view holds that sincerity is a socially determined effect of language and affect. As such, the dissertation begins by analyzing the valences of sincerity during the Thaw, exploring them in connection with writers of the Village Prose and Youth Prose movements as well as in the poetry of Evgenii Evtushenko. From this survey of different literary trends, a general framework of a shift from an essentialist to a performative conception of sincerity in Russian official literature is presented. This dissertation argues that there was a gradual process which saw authoritative discourse and a discourse of sincerity exist in tension with each other in the early Thaw before performativity seeped into sincerity rhetoric in the Youth Prose of the early ‘60s. An awareness of sincerity as rhetorical or performative language flourished in postmodernist literature and late Soviet underground art, creating a mode that was self-conscious of the impossibility of essential sincerity while still seeking a way to be sincere.