Marietta Shaginian’s Soviet production novel, Hydrocentral (Gidrotsentral’), represents a case of canonical limbo. Without exception, the novel is listed as a Soviet literary classic in reference works and compendia of Russian literature since the time of its publication in 1931 up to the present day, and yet its fame as an exemplary work of socialist realism (the officially mandated artistic and literary method established by the Soviet government in 1934) was extremely short-lived. This dissertation attempts to explain the reasons for the novel’s “in-between” status as a Soviet “classic” work of literature, but not an exemplar of socialist realism. Although Hydrocentral was published three years prior to the adoption of socialist realism, this dissertation argues that there is little doubt that Hydrocentral was one of a handful of Soviet literary works contributing to the formulation of its central tenets. Per the official definition, socialist realism “demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating [the working people] in the spirit of socialism.” Shaginian’s novel did, in fact, fulfill all the official requirements of socialist realism: it is a concrete, historically-grounded portrayal of life in rural Armenia at the inception of the first Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) in which objective reality (bytie) is characterized as unceasing dialectical movement. As a paean to inspired, creative socialist labor, Hydrocentral was also written with the express purpose of inculcating a socialist work ethic in Soviet citizens. Part I of this dissertation offers a structural explanation of the novel’s limbo status by demonstrating how the principle of multiplicity undergirds the novel’s structure at every level. Shaginian uses two types of multiplicity, conventional, as in artistic, not true-to-life (uslovnaia) and real, everyday (bytovaia) multiplicity, combining them in a way that achieves Shaginian’s to achieve unique vision of objective reality (bytie) as unceasing dialectical development. Part II of the dissertation demonstrates how the nature of this objective reality (bytie) has its philosophical underpinnings in German Idealism as espoused by Hegel and Goethe, as well as in the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx. At the phenomenological level, Hydrocentral is, a Marxist, materialist philosophical overlay that conceals deeper Idealist – and even Modernist – epistemological undercurrents.

Unlike the Russian Civil War or Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) never acquired a stable, dominant narrative in Soviet or Russian culture. Even as the war was in progress, Soviet media revised its evaluation of key events and players to reflect the changing political tides through the 1980s. After the war ended, state leaders were distracted by the political turbulence of the 1990s, and the citizens—largely unaffected by the war on a personal level—were not particularly interested in assessing either the war’s successes or failures. This lack of definition left the descriptions and representations of the Soviet-Afghan War open to the influence of evolving political realities and agendas. This study examines the literary techniques and strategies that writers Svetlana Alexievich and Alexander Prokhanov have employed in articulating different narratives that responded to the shifting demands of the moment. With respect to the several revisions that Alexievich made to her documentary novel Zinky Boys from its initial publication in 1990 through its final version in 2007, I argue that the author’s position as anti-authoritarian and anti-war becomes increasingly rigid. Like many liberal-minded members of the intelligentsia after the fall of the Soviet Union, Alexievich had early hopes for a transition from totalitarianism to democracy in her native Belarus which would be disappointed. The poetics of her documentary prose, I argue, challenge the traditional identities and relationships of author, character, and reader by destabilizing the boundaries and allowing crossovers between roles. By engaging the reader in constructing the deeper meaning of the novel, Alexievich projects her reader into the full and active participation of a citizen building a new post-Soviet state. Prokhanov, situated on the opposite side of the political divide, also made substantial revisions to his novels about the Soviet-Afghan War. Prokhanov’s 1994 novel The Palace is remarkable for its change in message and tone from the narratives of his Soviet-era writing on Afghanistan: it openly questions the Soviet Politburo’s decision to invade, and includes surreal dreamlike sequences that, I argue, reflect his contemporaneous collaboration with Alexander Dugin, founding proponent of neo-Eurasianism. In Dream about Kabul—his 2001 “remake” of his own 1982 novel Tree in the Center of Kabul—Prokhanov’s alter-ego protagonist becomes an even more passive participant in the progression of the Soviet-Afghan War, compared to The Palace, as well as a powerless pawn in the political conspiracies involving the Russian Federation, Israel, and the United States. His reader is more like the obedient subject of a tsar than the politically engaged citizen of a democracy, as envisioned by Alexievich. In my study of the substantial revisions that Alexievich and Prokhanov made to their Soviet-Afghan War stories from the 1980s into the twenty-first century, I demonstrate how the literary representations of a military conflict in recent Soviet history reflect the increasing polarization of political and social realities facing authors and readers in the post-Soviet states of Russia and Belarus. The aesthetic decisions that Alexievich and Prokhanov made in revising their Soviet-Afghan War stories carry political and ethical implications. Thus, the relationship between implied author and implied reader in a literary text becomes a political statement about the relationship between the state and the citizen.

This dissertation considers ten years in the life of one word. Between 1918 and 1928, khronika—the Russian word that describes newsreel filmmaking—became the site of extensive debates about the aesthetics and social responsibilities of the documentary film. Following the February revolution of 1917, khronika was promoted as the privileged record keeper of a new historical era, catalyzing a period of unprecedented formal innovation. During this period, Soviet documentarians transform the relationship between text and image, developing a film style that integrated verbal and visual material. In newsreel journal such as Kino-Pravda, images cease to be passive illustrations accompanying text and are for the first time treated as equally capable of delivering propositional content. Like other modernist art practices, khronika develops in dialogue with attempts to define its essence as a film genre and its medium specificity. Falling under the influence of competing strains within Constructivism, khronika is first conceived as a purely visual medium and then again as a purely factual one. Made up of seventeen variations on the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of khronika's evolution, the dissertation makes a crucial revision of documentary history. Rather than focus on the first instances of non-fiction films that adapt the narrative conventions of fiction film, Khronika examines the origins of documentary as an informational medium. Drawing on film theory, history of science, and philosophy, Khronika asks what it was that film learned to express during the first tumultuous decade when documentaries ceased to be windows onto a world and become the active interpreters of the reality captured by motion picture cameras. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

For the first time, the reception of the poetic legacy of the Latin poet Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) in the poetics courses taught at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (17th-first half of the 18th century) has become the subject of a wide-ranging research project presented in this dissertation. Quotations from Horace and references to his oeuvre have been divided according to the function they perform in the poetics manuals, the aim of which was to teach pupils how to compose Latin poetry. Three main aspects have been identified: the first consists of theoretical recommendations useful to the would-be poets, which are taken mainly from Horace's Ars poetica. The second aspect is the use of Horace's poetry as a model of word usage, tropes, rhetorical figures, and metrical schemes. Finally, the last important aspect of the reception of Horace is how his works could be imitated and his words or dicta borrowed in the composition of poetry, in which students were expected to exercise as part of the poetics course. The research draws the conclusion that Horace's legacy was of paramount importance in the manuals analyzed: on the one hand the Mohylanian poetics teachers' tendency (after Renaissance literary theorists and critics) to consider poetry within rhetorical categories rendered Horace's Ars Poetica extremely congenial to them. On the other, Horace's ideas were extrapolated from their original context and at times modified to serve a moralistic and "utilitarian" conception of poetry, which considered the latter as an instrumental science that served the ends of moral philosophy. With its metrical virtuosity and brilliant verbal craftsmanship, Horace's poetry provided an excellent model for the introduction of Christian content. The analysis of the way pagan authors (Horace first and foremost) were elaborated in a Christian key in the poetry composed by Mohylanian teachers and pupils indicates that education (and with it the assimilation of the Classics) at the KMA was not extraneous to the integration of ancient learning in Christian thinking as it took place in the different confessional schools of contemporary Western Europe. / Slavic Languages and Literatures

x, 94 p. : col. ill. / Siberia is a space that is more ideologic than it is geographic; it lacks defined physical boundaries and has no precise date of founding. Throughout its contemporary history as a Russian territory, the Siberia of public imagination has been dictated primarily by the views and agendas of external actors, and its culture and literature - despite having multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-religious roots - have been subsumed by the greater Russian tradition to which they are uneasily tied. Using an historical framework, this thesis establishes that there is, in fact, a canon of Siberian literature that stands apart from the Russian canon and that incorporates not only Russian texts but also other European and local indigenous ones. Furthermore, I contend that this canon has both been shaped by and continues to shape a pan-Siberian identity that unifies the border-less, ideologic space in a way that physical boundaries cannot. / Committee in charge: Dr. Katya Hokanson, Chairperson; Dr. Julie Hessler, Member; Dr. Jenifer Presto, Member

This dissertation examines a marginal group in Russian history and literature, domestic servants (dvorovye liudi)— proprietary peasants taken by their masters into the house to fulfill a variety of service roles. I consider this character group as an artistic device, an ideological signifier that draws upon a cluster of reader’s associations, and as a group deeply connected to the master class, the noblemen (dvoriane). Historically, the two were interconnected for generations, sharing domestic space, blood, history, and mutual interests. I argue that contrary to their historical prototypes, the Russian literary master and servant are interdependent, with both participants acutely aware of each other, allowing the implied author to use each to comment on the other and the wider social context of their relations. As the Emancipation (1861) approached, the literary portrayal of the shifting relations between these two groups began to signal the massive changes that shook Russian society during the long nineteenth century. These shifts were often depicted in spatial terms in literary works, with master and servant perpetually re-negotiating their mutual positions within limited spatial economies, most prominently, in the gentry house. Domestic space, where masters and servants coexist and which serves as a microcosm of Russian society, is the ideal space in which authors can navigate unstable social relationships and work out potential solutions to their conflicts. The domestic stage can stand in for the political or social one. How servants navigate space in their master’s home gives clues to the broader issues authors address in their narratives. My dissertation is structured according to the space most significant for the relationship between master and servant: the bedroom or nursery (Introduction), on the road (Chapter 1), private-public space (Chapter 2), and absence of space (Chapter 3). The Conclusion examines the increasing danger of the intimate and often inappropriate proximity of servant and master when combined with irreconcilable class differences and a steadfast resistance from those in power to the redistribution of space. I turn to works of Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Bunin to examine these spaces. Embedded in historical context, my project addresses the ramifications of the Emancipation and gestures forward to the historical events of the twentieth century. When high expectations for radical redistribution of resources and status were frustrated, transgression and then violence became the means for servants’ mobility, social and spatial. Russian literature from the “long nineteenth-century” captured the instability of the renegotiations of rights and resources between masters and servants. My conclusion sees the gentry house collapse as a result of these clashes.

This dissertation explores the ethical and aesthetic stakes of readers’ judgments by analyzing mock trials of literary characters that were performed in Soviet Russia and abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. Literary trials were part of a larger craze for public mock trials in the decades after the Russian Revolution. Mock trials functioned as a participatory and educational form of entertainment. Fictional defendants included Lenin, invented characters accused of drunkenness and hooliganism, and the Bible. At the same time as increasingly propagandistic mock trials were being performed, intellectuals staged trials of characters from nineteenth-century and contemporary Russian literature. In émigré communities such as Berlin, Paris, and Prague, literary trials were popular as entertainment and fundraisers through the 1920s and 1930s. My analysis focuses on mock trials of characters from works by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose novels proved especially popular for mock trial adaptations in the 1920 and 1930s. I also consider Nabokov’s participation in a mock trial based on The Kreutzer Sonata as a bridge between Tolstoy’s novella and Nabokov’s later novel Lolita. I read back and forth between the literary works and their mock trial adaptations in order to explore both how trial participants interpreted the texts and how the texts respond to the kinds of judgment at work in the trials. The challenges that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s fiction pose to readers became the central questions of mock trial adaptations: What is the relationship between interpretation and truth? Do we have the right to judge others? Does narrative have the power to redeem? I argue that while Soviet and émigré literary trials offer selective, politically motivated readings of the original works, they also enter into dialogue with the works’ major ethical questions and offer new ways of thinking about how truth, judgment, and redemption operate in them. As a result, the mock trials bring together two approaches to literature: a reader-centric approach that interprets the text in order to reveal something about the reader’s current reality, and a text-centric approach that aims to uncover the original meaning. While some of the literary trial interpretations and judgments appear to be misreadings, or bad readings, of the original works, I argue that this kind of reading, which closely attends to textual details while asking the text to speak to the readers’ present, offers a model for an ethically engaged approach to literature.

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