RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

This paper aims to analyze the metanovel narrative strategies in the postmodern literary context, defined by the scientific outcomes of quantum physics. According to them the world is a system of integrated space and time which are mutually complementary. The symmetry of time and space in this sense becomes the groundplan for the structural components of Andrei Bitov’s last novel. Through these components: for instance, echo, mirror, duality, the written and the unwritten, real life in the text and life out of context, physical time and grammatical time etc., we can find out the main course of the narrative and to point out its consistency. The apparent scrappiness performs the purpose to prove the capital importance of the route, of the journey, and not its end, probably non-existent. Following this point of view, hints at other works and authors (from ancient Greek myths to Nabokov) are also meant to share the invisible web of coexistence and persistency of the literary process.

The first “real” literary histories were written in the late eighteenth century; their heyday was in the nineteenth century (Positivism). As literary history became a mixture of biography, bibliography, description of sources and themes, and information on cultural, historical, and political background, it was criticized by the Russian Formalists, the Czech Structuralists, and the New Critics, who aimed at “pure” literary history. Later in the twentieth century doubts arose (Wellek; Perkins) about the possibility of writing a satisfactory history of literature: a literary history cannot be more than a collection of critical essays (Croce), a history of writers, institutions, and techniques. Despite these problems and criticisms, literary histories continue to be written: “comprehensive” histories, from a literature’s beginnings to the present, and histories of a group, genre, period, or masterworks. The article focuses on four recent histories of Russian literature: a comprehensive history; the history of a group (the Russian symbolists) during the First World War; a contribution to the history of the European novel through discussion of novels by Tolstoi and Dostoevskii; and a collection of essays on Russian underground and post-Soviet literature. Together they demonstrate the various forms literary history can take and how they can contribute to understanding a literature.

The paper discusses an important figure of Nikolai Leskov’s numerous literary works: a clergyman who does not accept rules in force in the Church, as he regards them as obstacles to true religion and people’s relationship with Christ. This character is analyzed in the context of Christian understanding of categories of obedience and disobedience, their biblical sources, as well as older Russian spiritual, cultural and literary tradition, namely “holy fools” and the Archpriest Avvakum. It also deliberates later transformations of the rebel priest figure in early-twentieth-century Russian literature in conjunction with the social changes and leftist political sympathies of the Russian clergy of that period.

This publication consists of diary entries written in January and February 1953 by the well-known Russian modernist writer Alexei Remizov. The entries have not been published previously and appear in print for the first time in this Russian Literature publication.

In this introductory article, the authors contextualize Alexei Remizov’s diary entries of January–February 1953, which are published in this Russian Literature volume for the first time. Remizov kept a diary almost throughout his entire life. The authors explain Remizov’s method of conducting diary writing and the evolution of his diary entries. They analyze the correlation of sleep and wakefulness in daily records, as well as numerous references by Remizov to the “transcendental nature of dreams” (as defined by the philosopher Pavel Florenskii). And they devote special attention to the transformation of dream motifs and Remizov’s search for their literary form in the process of creating his later works, The Fire of Things (Ogon’ veshchei, 1954) and Martyn Zadeka. Dream book (Martyn Zadeka. Sonnik, 1954).

This paper examines the new understanding of power that emerges in the late works of Leo Tolstoy, as an early premonition of ideas subsequently elaborated by Michel Foucault, particularly his seminal conception of bio-politics. In works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and particularly the novel Resurrection (1899), Tolstoy undertakes precisely the kind of “struggle against power” which Foucault identifies as a fundamental task of the modern intellectual: “a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious”. In confronting the manifold manifestations of a new logic of power – a logic that he never manages to grasp fully – Tolstoy continues to rely on analytical perspectives he ostensibly denounces. Yet no one went further than Tolstoy in acknowledging and combating his own complicity with the system of power, both as a landowner and an intellectual. From this perspective Tolstoy heralds the transformation of the intellectual and conscience subsequently called for by Foucault.

This article traces the development of Russian actionism through a biopolitical lens. Emerging in the 1990s as a public enactment of post-Soviet society’s regression from bios to zoē, actionism became more consciously biopolitical in the twenty-first century as a succession of artists sought to challenge the biopoliticization of life under Vladimir Putin. Focusing on the actions and statements of Voina, Pussy Riot, Pyotr Pavlensky, and Katrin Nenasheva, the author identifies four main tactics of resistance, gradually leading actionism away from its roots in aestheticized violence toward the cultivation of practices of radical care. The article concludes with a brief overview of actions performed in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

This paper explores the contested status of political sovereignty and the role of infrastructure in establishing political power in Crimea, a Ukrainian territory taken over by Russia in 2014. I analyze the complexities of the construction of the Crimean Bridge, a huge infrastructure project completed by Russia in 2019 to connect Crimea with Russia, along with the bridge’s practical and symbolic value. I suggest that apart from performing a socio-economic function, the bridge has been invested with significant symbolic power, and provides material routes and forms for the construction of a unified national geohistorical consciousness. I argue that the Crimean bridge has become a “focal object” for Russian cultural biopolitics, providing a space for the state-sponsored performances of power that have come to define both the Russian political agenda and efforts to reconnect Crimea historically to Russia. Indeed, the bridge has not only connected the banks of the Kerch Strait between Crimea and the Russian mainland but has also connected different and often competing narratives of Russian history.

This article addresses the biopolitics of writing and the construction of the writing body as catastrophic in the notebooks of Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) and the essays by his friend philosopher Yakov Druskin (1902–1980) from the late 1920s and 1930s. I aim to show how their personal writings work as an auto-aggressive text, an act of textual self-harm and a form of freedom in a situation where resistance is felt to be unavailable. The close reading focuses on the two tendencies in which the biological comes to be understood as political: the articulation of a social/political difference as physiological, and the centrality of sexuality to a project of self-knowledge that diary-writing offers. Narrating social exclusion in the language of ailments, this writing appears almost literally biopolitical: biologising political difference and inviting a political reading of the origins of the illness. By tracing these instances, the article shows how the failing body becomes a language in which the sense of alienation and fear can be expressed, and spiritual insights experienced.

This paper is the introduction to a cluster of articles on Cultural Biopolitics in Russia. After providing an overview of biopolitical theory and its recent applications to the study of Russian history and politics, the author introduces the notion of “cultural biopolitics” as a theoretical bridge between biopolitical theory and cultural studies. Culture is conceived as a realm of “soft” power in which biopolitical rationalities are reinforced or challanged. Given its many historical entanglements with power, Russian culture in particular provides a rich field of inquiry for scholars of modern biopolitics. The introduction concludes with short summaries of each of the articles in the cluster, which are divided into two categories: “Biopolitics of Writing” and “Biopolitical Performance”.