Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Elsa Triolet, born Ella Jurievna Kagana in Moscow in 1896, brought into her French works ideas absorbed during her contact with Russian Futurist poets and theoreticians. This study traces these influences in her prose. Chapter I presents the biographical details of Triolet's Futurist acquaintanceship, and her shift from Russian to French as her literary language. Certain basic characteristics that underly all of Triolet's work, such as mobility and daily gesture, are presented to give background to the discussion. Chapter II starts the analysis at the level of the word. Triolet's acceptance of the Futurist principle of the word as something to create gives way to a creative use of cliche. Jakobsonian concepts are brought into play to demonstrate the significance of the repetition of words in Triolean narrative. Lastly, the word as sound and the use of colloquialisms are explained. Chapter III enlarges the sphere of study to specific literary devices. Sklovskij's concept of ostranenie ("making strange"), the representation of something without its cultural landmarks, is illustrated, and Jakobson's analysis of the incongruous stranger in Russian realist fiction is applied to Triolet's works. The importance of svoe mesto ("one's place") and the practice of collage, the appearance of real people or documents in the fictional narrative, are examined. Chapter IV takes on Triolet's narrative structure as a whole. Parallels are drawn between Futurist concepts and modern paradigms in general so as to situate Triolet's prose in contemporary models. The participatory nature of Triolean narrative is discussed, as are her different structural models, including those influenced by the Russian oral epic, similar in many ways to modern structure and a basis for Triolet's Le Cheval blanc. Chapter V is dominated by studies of multiplicity and perspective. Different aspects of character development are discussed, as is the expanding of the incongruous stranger into a structural element. Time, place, and perspective as foregrounded elements are examined. Chapter VI brings Triolet back to Russian. It analyses her thoughts on translation and self-translation, and offers examples of her work in that field.

The life and career of the remarkable Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) offers a paradigm for the modern woman writer. Despite the great number of women associated with Western Modernism, the Modernist canon is striking for the paucity of its women representatives. This thesis hopes to redress that situation, starting with a new reading of Tsvetaeva's epic poem of the Russian Civil War, Perekop (1928-1929). Perekop is the culmination of Tsvetaeva's verse experimentation with her culture's received constructs of gender and genre and it is the work in which she realizes the voice of an anonymous female bard. The failure of this poem to attract critical recognition parallels the experience of comparably innovative work among Tsvetaeva's female contemporaries. Tsvetaeva's work, in verse and prose, is a de facto manifesto of a female poetics. Deciphering the terms of this female modernist poetics provides a critical discourse in which to appreciate the comparably innovative and de-valued work of other modernist women writers. My thesis first outlines the cultural obstacles to Tsvetaeva's epic ambition, then explicates the strategies by which she accomplishes it. Through her re-writing of the gender-linked metaphors of Western poetics, Tsvetaeva creates the modern female bard. The trajectory of my analysis is determined by the unifying system of lyric tropes I extract from both prose and verse. This series of tropes is then located in Tsvetaeva's appropriation of western ideas, ranging from the practice of Homer, Herodotus, Hesiod and Heraclitus through the theories of the German Romantics and Nietzsche to the practice of the Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Boris Pasternak. My analysis culminates in the exploration of the medieval Russian text Slovo o polku Igoreve as the unifying sub-text of Tsvetaeva's Perekop.

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This dissertation interrogates the intertextual and intercultural exchanges that, since the 19th century, have consistently led to the uniform, exoticized, and limiting literary and cinematic construction of the Roma as freedom-loving misunderstood outcasts with outstanding musical skills. The formation and reiteration of these images is presented as the result of four key political and cultural moments: the emergence of nationalism as an ideology in the 19th century; the genesis of the motion picture as a dominant medium in the early 20th century; the cultural and ideological East-West dichotomy created during the Cold War; and, finally, the rapid development of new media and technologies (DVD, Internet, etc.), as well as new modes of production and distribution related to the opening of inter-European borders in a post-Cold-War world context. A number of literary and cinematic texts that illustrate these representational shifts are examined in roughly chronological order. In the 19th century, Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Mérimée's Carmen, and Pushkin's "The Gypsies" were critical to the establishment of the image of the "Gypsy" as a traveling dancer, and as part of an interethnic romantic triangle. This image was then visualized in early cinematic adaptations of these texts, particularly through interpretations of the "Gypsy" embodied by the Hollywood star system in the 1930s and 1940s, including performances by Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, and Orson Welles that set the tone for later portrayals. Although such performances and ideological constructs were denounced by Cold-War-era Communist ideology, they were nonetheless reproduced in Eastern European cinematic variants, and became particularly prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as revealed in the work of Yugoslav (Petrović, Paskaljević) and Soviet (Loteanu, Blank) directors popular with East bloc audiences. In contemporary international cinema, French-Algerian-Romani director Tony Gatlif's and Bosnian-Serb Emir Kusturica's "Gypsy films" attempt a layered, multicultural approach to Romani representation, but fail to avoid earlier romanticized depictions of the ethnic group as carefree non-national musicians. The dissertation concludes by outlining the ways in which American, European, and even Asian cinematic and televisual texts continue to recycle 19 th century literary representations in current media narratives within a globalized culture.

Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, Nikolai Gogol and Fedor Tiutchev were steeped in the ideals of the German Romantic movement, towards which both writers display a particular affinity. This movement had a significant impact on contemporary Russian culture, which was pulling a variety of heterogeneous elements into its vortex. Taking this affinity into account, this dissertation offers a new reading of Gogol's last book, Selected Passages from a Correspondence with Friends. In order to clarify the structure of Selected Passages and to demonstrate that language is central to Gogol's Weltanschauung, his early works are first examined. Right from the start, the importance of language and the search for an individual idiom is announced in Gogol's writings. Selected Passages is considered in its entirety. A structural analysis of the book's composition reveals an implicit theory of language underlying the sequence of its parts. Gogol views the contemporary state of language as corrupt and leading to spiritual death. The redemption of humanity is possible only if the original purity of language is restored. Thus, Gogol advocates a regressive movement towards the pure, God-given Word. Gogol insists that the Russian language is undergoing an acute crisis. He foresees a way out of this crisis through the emergence of a new poetic language that will partake not only of the Russian literary language, but of other sources of inspiration as well. Tiutchev's poetry represents just such a language, and is thus one manifestation of Gogol's linguistic advocacy. Introducing a new aesthetic into Russian prosody, Tiutchev opened new vistas for poetry and the Russian language. A comparison between Tiutchev and the German Romantic poet Eichendorff reveals striking similarities between the two poets. This similarity is not to be seen as an instance of one poet influencing the other, but rather that both are responding, to an astonishing degree, to the same aesthetic values.

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This dissertation takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy's famous contention that the works of the Russian literary canon represent "deviation[s] from European forms." It is envisioned as a response to (or an elaboration upon) critical works that address the unique rise, formation, and poetics of the Russian novel, many of which are themselves responses (or Russian corollaries) to Ian Watt's study of the rise of the novel in England; and it functions similarly under the assumption that the singularity of the Russian novel is a product of various idiosyncrasies in the Russian cultural milieu. The project is structured as a comparative examination of two pairs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels from Russia and England, and as such it approaches the question of the Russian novel's distinctiveness in the form of a literary experiment. By engaging in close readings of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) alongside Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook (Prigozhaia povarikha, 1770), and Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880), concentrating particularly on matters of formal design, corporeal integrity and vulnerability, and communal harmony and discord--and by understanding the English texts as a "control group" for an examination of the Russian deviation--it attempts to identify some of the distinctive features of the Russian realist novel. The largest portion of the dissertation is dedicated to The Brothers Karamazov, which I take as an emblematic work in a literary canon that is distinguished by intimations that healing and recovery--as well as the coexistence of both personal freedom and communal rapport--are possible in the real world and in realist narrative.

This dissertation examines the development of Russian literature in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union as a focused study in how literature adjusts to institutional failure. It investigates how cultural forms reproduce themselves and how literature continues to forge meaningful symbolic connections with its audiences, traditions, and the broader culture. I begin when Soviet state prizes, publishers, and organizations like the Writers Union could no longer provide paths to literary prominence in the early 1990s and a booming book market and a privatized prestige economy stepped into the vacuum. At this time, post-Soviet Russian authors faced a mixed blessing: freedom from censorship alongside a disorienting array of new publishers, prizes, and critical outlets, joined later by online and social media. In this new environment, personal success became an important structural value for authors and for literary works. The literary process was driven, in large part, by authors who found innovative solutions to immediate problems along their pathways to success. In search of readers, recognition, and aesthetic innovation, the authors in this dissertation transformed and even created the institutional and economic frameworks for post-Soviet Russian literature’s development, while at the same time developing new cultural forms capable of connecting with audiences in intimate and meaningful ways. The sum effect of their individual solutions to discrete problems along their own paths to success was a profound shift in the literary field, the creation and entrenchment of a new system of cultural production, distribution and consumption based on capitalist principles—the system I call “cultural capitalism.” This dissertation shows how cultural capitalism developed out of the institutional collapse of the Soviet cultural system. While many studies have analyzed the cultural field’s genesis, its social role, and internal mechanisms, few have considered the fate of literature or culture at times of institutional failure, and fewer still have focused on possible mechanisms of recovery. Studies of contemporary Russian literature, on the other hand, have often relied on master tropes, frequently borrowed from Western literary theory. While this research constitutes an important contribution, it fails to address the central question of how literature has been affected by social upheaval and institutional failure. My project addresses this gap by modeling cultural capitalism as a literary system in which the drive for success is pervasive, but the very meaning of “success” can be defined differently by different authors. The term cultural capitalism builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, but imagines that resource as part of a dynamic system of cultural exchange, while my understanding of success expands on Boris Dubin’s work on the topic. Finally, building on Formalist investigations of “literary evolution” and the “literary everyday,” as well as contemporary Russian sociological studies, I provide a theoretical model that connects the structures of the post-Soviet literary environment to new forms of verbal art. Through interviews, close readings, and secondary research, I show how four prominent authors—Boris Akunin, Olga Slavnikova, Aleksei Ivanov, and Vera Polozkova—have developed idiosyncratic visions of success. I then demonstrate how each author’s particular patterns of ambitions correlate with the literary, economic, and institutional innovations that define their artistic works, careers, and positions in the literary field. By triangulating authors’ visions of success, their navigations of the literary field, and their innovative verbal art, I map out the trajectories of literature as both an institution and as an art form across the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era.