No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

"Tolstoy and Zola" juxtaposes the two writers to examine the evolution of the novel during the late nineteenth century. The juxtaposition is justified by the literary critical debates that were taking place in Russian and French journals during the 1870s and 1880s, concerning Tolstoy and Zola. In both France and Russia, heated arguments arose over the future of realism, and opposing factions held up either Tolstoy's brand of realism or Zola's naturalism as more promising. This dissertation uses the differences between Tolstoy and Zola to make more prominent a commonality in their respective novels Anna Karenina (1877) and La Bête humaine (1890): the railways. But rather than interpret the railways in these two novels as a symbol of modernity or as an engine for narrative, I concentrate on one particular aspect of the railway experience, known as motion parallax, which is a depth cue that enables a person to detect depth while in motion. Stationary objects close to a travelling train appear to be moving faster than objects in the distance, such as a mountain range, and moreover they appear to be moving backward. By examining motion parallax in both novels, as well as in some of Tolstoy's other works, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and The Death of Ivan Il'ich (1886), this dissertation attempts to address an intriguing question: what, if any, is the relationship between the advent of trains and the evolution of the novel during the late nineteenth century? Motion parallax triggers in a traveller the sensation of going backward even though one is travelling forward. This cognitive dissonance relates to Tolstoy's and Zola's depictions of Darwinism in their works. Despite their differences, both writers subscribed to a belief in the "fallacy of progress" and thought that technology was causing man, contrary to expectations, to regress. This dissertation explores the relationships between Darwinism, trains, and nineteenth-century notions of progress and degeneration in not only Anna Karenina and La Bête humaine, but also in The Kreutzer Sonata, and Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867) and Germinal (1885). The goal of this multi-disciplinary dissertation, which interweaves literary analysis with sociology, history of science, and visual cultural history, is to provide a new perspective on the relationship between technology and narrative.

The first post-World War II generation of Soviet Russian writers was faced with a crisis of language even more pervasive and serious than the "Crisis of Symbolism" at the beginning of the 20th century: the level of abstraction and formulaic speech used in public venues had become such that words and phrases could only gesture helplessly in the direction of mysterious meaning. Due to the traditional status of poetry in Russian culture and to various other factors explored in this dissertation, the generation of poets coming of age in the mid-1950s was in a unique position to spearhead a renewal of language. Among those who took up the challenge was a group of four friends in Leningrad: Dmitry Bobyshev, Joseph Brodsky, Anatoly Naiman, and Evgeny Rein. Because of the extreme position this group adopted regarding the use of language, I refer to them in this work not as "Akhmatova's Orphans"--a term commonly applied to the quartet--but as literary "Avvakumites," a name Anna Akhmatova suggested that invokes the history of Archpriest Avvakum, who by rejecting reforms in church ritual founded the Orthodox sect now known as Old Believers. In a similar fashion, the "Avvakumites" of Leningrad eventually became exemplary for their generation in their creation of an alternative cultural space that simply ignored the demands of Soviet literature, cleaving instead to the much older tradition of humane letters. For the purpose of establishing the development of the Avvakumites into poets of the humane letters who absolutely rejected the language and dictates of Soviet Realism, I have focused on the contemporary scene: poetry and living poets published in the Soviet press, radio waves from the West, and the lively interactions among various groups within the new generation of Russian poets. The four poets at the center of my study coalesced as a group in Leningrad by the late 1950s, eventually finding their shared link to the humanist tradition in Russian letters in the person of Akhmatova, with whom all four became more or less friendly. Chapter 1 of my dissertation begins with a consideration, based largely on the important and influential anthology Poetry Day (Den' poezii, 1956), of the state of Soviet poetry following World War II and especially after Joseph Stalin's death. In the second part of Chapter One I discuss poets represented in the pages of Thaw era publications in relation to the development of the Avvakumites' poetry. Among the poets under discussion here are: Nikolai Aseev, Viktor Bokov, Sergei Esenin, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Dmitry Kedrin, Leonid Martynov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Boris Slutsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Konstantin Vanshenkin, Evgeny Vinokurov. Chapter 2 examines how the Avvakumites came to their uncompromising position in regard to publishing, via studies of the Leningrad Technological Institute's short-lived wall newspaper, Kul'tura (Culture) and of several poems written on the occasion of the launching of Sputnik (1957). In the final section of Chapter Two, I consider the role of poetry circles called Literaturnye ob''edineniia, or LITOs, in providing an alternative space in which to share poetry, their influence in the formation of distinct poetic groups [kompanii], and how the Avvakumites' humanist focus distinguished their group from other kompanii. Among poets discussed in this chapter are Mikhail Krasilnikov, Stanoslav Krasovitsky, Yaroslov Smelyakov, and Vladimir Uflyand. Chapter 3 takes up another influential contemporary source of exciting new rhythms and themes: the Voice of America's radio jazz program, Music USA, hosted by Willis Conover. Beyond showing how the Avvakumites incorporated jazz rhythms and themes into their poetry, I argue that Conover's interviews with jazz artists conveyed to the Avvakumites and their generation an attractive and influential narrative of independence and human dignity. Russian and western artists discussed here include Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Eartha Kitt, Gerry Mulligan, Valery Mysovsky, Charlie Parker, Nonna Sukhanova. In Chapter 4 I discuss how Anna Akhmatova became the culminating shaping force on the young Avvakumites. Akhmatova was a living bridge to the broken-off traditions of Russian poetry, the warmth of whose personal relations with these young poets marked an intense era of collective growth and sharing that ended with her death. The Avvakumites emerged early and strongly as a group of gifted poets who rejected the strictures of Socialist Realism while embracing the humanist tradition in Russian letters. Brodsky has become emblematic to the world at large in that regard, his pivotal role in the history of literature marked by the Nobel Prize in 1987. In this dissertation I have tried to place the emergence of Brodsky in its broader context, analyzing the surprisingly rich contemporary landscape of rhythms, sounds, and ideas, and especially the roles of the members of his friendship group in making the independent "Avvakumite" turn that signified, in a way, the beginning of the end of Soviet rule.

This dissertation examines the effort of Russian writers to reform Soviet socialism in the first decade after Joseph Stalin's death. My departure point is the idea that the Soviet experiment was about the creation not only of a new socio-economic system, but also of a New Man. According to the logic of Soviet socialism, it was the New Man who would usher in the new socio-economic order by living out philosophical ideas in his everyday life. Under Khrushchev, Russian writers bestowed the New Man with even more power to build Communism. Stalin, the superhuman engine of historical progress, had died, giving ordinary citizens more agency, according to the contemporary discourse, to shape the future and overcome the consequences of his cult of personality. A new emphasis was placed on sincerity and the individual; and not only on fashioning the future, but also on understanding the details of the past and present. Among writers, a new importance was allotted to the diary, which was conceptualized as a space of sincerity, and as a genre that helped one grasp the facts of everyday existence and pen realistic representations of Soviet life. This dissertation investigates this discourse of sincerity, realism, and the diary among the literary intelligentsia. It features a number of intellectuals, Aleksandr Iashin, Valentin Ovechkin, Aleksandr Tvardovskii, and several others, many of whom kept diaries in, or employed the diaristic genre in their works of, the Khrushchev years. Based on a reading of their unpublished and published writings, my project locates not a single personality ideal, but several, united by an emphasis on sincerity and realism. I examine Khrushchev's Secret Speech about Stalin's cult of personality in this context, and demonstrate that the speech, commonly considered a discursive departure in Soviet history, in fact echoed earlier narrative conventions. For the purpose of close reading, I center the project around Fedor Abramov (1920-1983), a leading writer of the post-Stalin era, and how he used his diary and personal notebooks to fashion himself into a New Man. I analyze Abramov's effort to transform not only his thoughts and actions, but also his emotions and diaristic grammar in keeping with his version of the new personality ideal. The conventional interpretation of the Khrushchev era is of a period of uneven cultural liberalization during which the leadership pursued socio-economic goals incompatible with its desire to maintain a monopoly on power. My focus on self-transformation builds a bridge between the cultural and social, economic, and political histories. In the contemporaneous literature, I locate a discourse that describes personal transformation as the catalyst of socio-economic and political change. Personal transformation, I conclude, was the primary imperative of the age. I thus situate the Khrushchev era in a century-long Russian tradition of living out philosophical ideas in everyday life in an effort to move History forward, and of writers conceptualizing themselves as leading forces of change. Finally, I demonstrate that the version of the New Man into which Russian intellectuals aimed to fashion themselves and their fellow citizens under Khrushchev marked a crucial break in the understanding of the individual in Russian and Soviet history.

This dissertation examines images of China produced in early Soviet culture, focusing in particular on the mid-to-late 1920s, a period of heightened Soviet involvement in Chinese politics. It argues that China became in this period the primary testing ground for the creation of an "internationalist aesthetics": a mode of representation that might express horizontal solidarity over vertical dominance, and inscribe China into the global map envisioned by Marist-Leninist theories of revolution. Seeking to produce a new China to replace the exotic Orient, Soviet artists and writers experimented with multiple genres and media--reportage, film, theatre, biography--in their search for the correct mode for internationalist aesthetics. The struggle over how to represent the world for a revolutionary society thus coalesces, in this period, around the question of how to represent China. Such an aesthetics is inevitably interconnected with politics, and internationalist aesthetics encountered and expressed the same ambiguities as the political project of Soviet internationalism: a liberatory, anti-imperial ideology that simultaneously sought to control political and historical narratives from the world revolution's proclaimed centre in Moscow. Consequently, these disparate images are united by an insistence on the privileged position and perspective of the Soviet observer, who looks at Chinese reality with a combination of advanced modern knowledge, sympathy with oppression, and revolutionary experience that is purportedly inaccessible to other Europeans, or indeed to the Chinese themselves. This privileged perspective on China undergirds the claims of internationalist aesthetics to present a true image of the world. The search for an authoritative mode for internationalist aesthetics is hampered, however, by recurrent issues of access, mediation and translatability, and by lingering parallels between this avowedly anti-imperialist discourse and the imperial systems of knowledge production it supposedly replaces.