Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism

Cambridge University Press
Edition: First Edition. Hardback. Dust Jacket., 6/25/2015
EAN 9781107073210, ISBN10: 1107073219

Hardcover, 313 pages, 23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

Russian literature has a reputation for gloomy texts, especially during the late nineteenth century. This volume argues that a 'fin-de-siècle' mood informed Russian literature long before the chronological end of the nineteenth century, in ways that had significant impact on the development of Russian realism. Some chapters consider ideas more readily associated with fin-de-siècle Europe such as degeneration theory, biodeterminism, Freudian psychoanalysis or apocalypticism, alongside earlier Russian realist texts by writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Other chapters explore the changes that realism underwent as modernism emerged, examining later nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century texts in the context of the earlier realist tradition or their own cultural moment. Overall, a team of emerging and established scholars of Russian literature and culture present a wide range of creative and insightful readings that shed new light on later realism in all its manifestations.

Introduction
the fin-de-siècle mood in Russian literature Ani Kokobobo and Katherine Bowers
1. The Russian Rougon-Macquart
degeneration and biological determinism in The Golovlev Family Kate Holland
2. The hiding places of the self in Dostoevsky's Adolescent Yuri Corrigan
3. A childhood's garden of despair
Dostoevsky and 'The Boy at Christ's Christmas Party' Robin Feuer Miller
4. The railway and the elemental force
Slavophilism, Pan-Slavism, and apocalyptic anxieties in Anna Karenina Alexander Burry and S. Ceilidh Orr
5. 'Mister Russian Beast'
civilization's discontents in Turgenev Emma Lieber
6. Masculine degeneration in Dostoevsky's Demons Connor Doak
7. The burden of superfluity
reconsidering female heroism in Chekhov's The Seagull Jenny Kaminer
8. The fall of the house
Gothic narrative and the decline of the Russian family Katherine Bowers
9. Corpses of desire and convention
Tolstoy's and Artsybashev's grotesque realism Ani Kokobobo
10. The little man in the overcoat
Gogol and Krzhizhanovsky Muireann Maguire
11. Icons, eclipses and stepping off the train
Vladimir Korolenko and the Ocherk Jane Costlow
12. Decadent ecosystems in Uncle Vanya
a chorographic meditation Thomas Newlin
13. The mute body
Leonid Andreev's abject realism Edith W. Clowes
14. The thinking oyster
Turgenev's 'Drama of Dying' as the decay of Russian realism Ilya Vinitsky
15. An afterword on the potential of ends Caryl Emerson
Bibliography.