Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Russian and East European Literature'

This dissertation aims in part to redress the shortage of close readings of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Aleksandr Rodchenko's joint project, the book Pro Eto. It explores the relationship between the book's visual and verbal aspects, treating the book and its images as objects that repay attentive looking and careful analysis. By these means this dissertation finds that the images do not simply illustrate the text, but have an intertextual relationship with it: sometimes the images suggest their own, alternative narrative, offering scenes that do not exist in the poem; sometimes they act as literary criticism, suggesting interpretations, supplying biographical information, and highlighting with their own form aspects of the poem's.

This analysis reveals Pro Eto's strong links with distant forms of art and literature. The poem's intricate ties to the book of Genesis and Victor Shklovsky's novel Zoo, written while the former literary critic was in exile in Berlin, evince an ambivalence about the manifestations of socialism in early-1920s Russia that is missing from much of Mayakovsky's work. At the same time Rodchenko's images, with their repeated references to Byzantine icons and Dadaist photomontage, expand the poem's scope and its concerns far beyond NEP-era Moscow. Thus my analysis finds that although Pro Eto is considered to be an emblematic Constructivist work, many of the received ideas about Russian Constructivism—the unswerving zeal of its practitioners, the utility of its production, and in particular the ideology-driven, sui-generis nature of the movement itself—are not supported by the book. Pro Eto's deep connections with art and literature outside of Bolshevik Russia contradict the idea—first set out by the Constructivists themselves and widely accepted by subsequent scholars—of Constructivism as an autochthonous movement, born of theory, and indebted neither to historical art movements nor to contemporary western ones. My analysis suggests that reading Pro Eto through the lens of Constructivist theory denies the work the richness, ambivalence and humor it gains when that theory is understood as being in conversation with artistic practice, rather than defining it.

"Historicity and the Romantic Novel in Britain and Russia" explores the engagement of early nineteenth-century Russian writers with contemporary British novels. Most studies of Russian fiction emphasize Russia's reliance on French models. Due to the profound shift in the understanding of history that occurred in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the less studied and underappreciated British connection also played a formative role in the development of the Russian novel. During those years, the definition of history was broadened to include the previously excluded areas of social experience and private life. Imbued with a reflexive awareness of its task, British Romantic historicism purported not only to place the objects of study within their actual settings but also to invent situations in which historical events might have occurred. This general boost in historicist sensibility affected not only the development of the English-language novel, but also the emerging tradition of Russian fiction. The two parts of my dissertation each focus on two exemplary novels: in the first part, The Bride of Lammermoor by Walter Scott and Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol; in the second, The Last Man by Mary Shelley and Russian Nights by Vladimir Odoevsky. In each case, I consider the mechanisms of self-renewal that allow the Romantic novel to depict historical pressures and adapt to them. Drawing on German idealist philosophy and Scottish Enlightenment historiographical models, I study the use of metaphor and allegory and the relation between such sub-genres as the gothic and grotesque, showing how they contributed to a reimagining of the role of history in Britain. In more extreme and fragmented forms, this new view of history then became the basis for a similarly radical recasting of history in Russia. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the prose of the Romantic novel in its rhetorical extravagance offered ways to enrich, redeem, and reimagine history.

This dissertation is an investigation of a theoretical problem—the determination of truth and being in a work of literary fiction—in the context of a momentous event in the history of mathematics—the discovery of a consistent non-Euclidean geometry. Beginning with the first interpretations of the philosophical significance of non-Euclidean geometry to enter the Russian cultural sphere in the 1870s, I analyze how the works by three Russian authors—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and Daniil Kharms—integrate the principles of mathematical truth into their construction of a fictional ontology and methods of fictional truth evaluation. Each author, I argue, combines their own aesthetic program with the changes in the philosophy of mathematics underwent in their respective eras and historical contexts. The diversity of these contexts provides the variables, against which this theoretical problem is analyzed.

The first chapter deals with Dostoevsky's interpretation of non-Euclidean geometry and its philosophical significance expressed in Ivan Karamazov's rebellion against God in Brothers Karamazov. I argue that Dostoevsky deploys the Euclidean/non-Euclidean binary to juxtapose two methods of fictional truth evaluation—a traditional model, obsolete in light of the principles of non-Euclidean geometry, and another model, which Dostoevsky embraces in Brothers Karamazov, based on the paradoxical and yet true axioms of the new geometry. I phrase the distinction in the terms of possibility and necessity: the new model of fictional truth evaluation is for propositions which are true in all possible worlds except the actual. In Chapter Two, I draw upon previous analysis of Nabokov's The Gift and the mention of Lobachevsky's geometry in the internal biography of Chernyshevsky, to argue that the narrative structure of The Gift returns to the Euclidean/non-Euclidean binary as introduced by Dostoevsky, but re-interprets the otherworldly according to Nabokov's own aesthetic praxis and the interpretation of non-Euclidean geometry by late-nineteen and early twentieth century geometers and physicists. Nabokov applies concepts of non-Euclidean geometry and space to the actual world. This analysis provides a framework for interpreting the space and time of The Gift according to structures suggested within the novel itself. The third chapter investigates Kharms's interpretation of the significance and meaning of geometry in light of the impact that non-Euclidean geometry had on mathematical propositions as a means of describing possible states of affairs. I place Kharms's fictional objects, such as the red-headed man of "Blue Notebook no. 10," and implications to truth evaluation in "Sonnet" and "Symphony no. 2," in the context of anti-Kantian theories of truth and logic, which arose in the period around the turn of twentieth century.

In the past ten years or more, social complexity has taken center stage as the focus of archaeologists working on the Eurasian steppe. The Middle Bronze Age Sintashta period, ca. 2100 - 1700 BC, is often assumed to represent the apex of social complexity for the Bronze Age in the southern Urals region. This assumption has been based on the appearance of twenty-two fortified settlements, chariot burials, and intensified metal production. Some of these studies have incorporated the emergence and subsequent development of mobile pastoralism as their primary foci, while others have concerned themselves primarily with early forms of metal production and their association with seemingly nascent social hierarchies. Such variables are useful indicators of more complex forms of social organization usually accompanied by strong degrees of demographic centralization and social differentiation.

This dissertation explores the relationship between demographic centralization and the balance between social differentiation and integration based on the data collected during archaeological survey of 142 square km around and between two Sintashta period settlements, Stepnoye and Chernorech'ye, located in the Ui River valley of the southern Urals region, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian Federation. Because of the multi-component nature of archaeological survey, materials recovered date from the Mesolithic to the twentieth century. However, the focus was on Bronze Age materials to better identify and evaluate changes between demographic centralization and social differentiation.

Center-hinterland dynamics and the use of historical capital (materials, practices, and places re-used in identifiable ways) were evaluated from the Middle Bronze Age Sintashta period through to the end of the Final Bronze Age. Based on the results of the Sintashta Collaborative Archaeological Research Project (SCARP) project, the ongoing work of Russian scholars, and the results of this dissertation, there is considerable evidence that it was in the Late Bronze Age that social complexity may have become more pronounced, even as the demographically centralized Sintashta period communities dispersed. The results of the landscape and materials analyses indicate strong possibilities for land-use and craft traditions carried through to the end of the Final Bronze Age, with such traditions acting as historical capital for later communities.

The creative content contained within this thesis is comprised of two collections of short stories: The Death of an Escargot (or Strange Feelings of Petrov) and & Stories. Together, these story collections represent the fruits of my labors as a student of the M.F.A. program at California State University at Long Beach. The Death of an Escargot (or Strange Feelings of Petrov) is a story cycle that places emphasis on experimentation and creative possibility. The second section, & Stories, represents my engagement with more traditional methods, as well as an earnest attempt at giving voice to distinct communities that are often under-represented within the literary cannon. It is my intention that these stories be understood as representations of my interests as a writer, as well as artifacts to be considered as aides in the formation of my own creative identity.

Theorists of the sublime have struggled to make the category coherent because they have collapsed its causes, the experience of the event itself, its subsequent effects on a subject, the symptomatic appearance of those effects in written texts, and the effects such texts have on a readership or audience, all into one concept: "the sublime." However, by slowing down the sublime event, parsing out its stages temporally, and drawing out their distinctive qualities, we not only can make some parts of the total sublime experience effable and coherent, but also we can discover meaning and significance in texts, such as strange or difficult poems, that may otherwise seem to be incomprehensible, irrational, or irresponsible uses of language. In turn, because such sublime texts refer both to experiences and to the subject that has them, such readings invite expanded understandings of human being (noun) and human being (gerund). This hypothesis is not new, but I complicate it by understanding human being through not one but at least three interrelated lenses: existential/experiential, biological/embodied, and social/civilizational. Therefore, to show adequately the sublime event's reputed "interruption of being", its continued relevance to the study of being, and what it reveals about human being, I analyze three types of poetries interested in these three aspects of human being.

In my introductory chapter, I critically review arguments made about the sublime in literary history, both canonical – such as Longinus's, Burke's, and Kant's – and more recent, such as Suzanne Guerlac's, Francis Ferguson's, and Neil Hertz's. I attend to the sublime's delineations as well as its rewards and risks. I differ, however, when I conclude that the cause is a perception that interrupts meaning-making and self-making cognitive processes. I clarify why the experience of the event is reputably private, contingent, and virtually ineffable. I argue that the sublime can only enter public discourse through the logic of symptom, of which poems can be examples. In other words, because poems are in and of language, they show a recovery from the sublime event, to which they can refer but which they cannot represent. I read Sappho's Ode and a section of Wordsworth's "Prelude" to demonstrate the effectiveness of reading poems in this way.

In each of the chapters that follow, I read both typical poems and sublime recovery poems, highlighting the qualities that make a sublime recovery poem recognizable within the context of its respective poet's work. Thereafter, I discuss the consequences of the meaning these poems make. In my analysis, I remain faithful to the terms the poet develops across his body of work.

I introduce the existential sublime event through Zagajewski's poetry. I build the contextual background that the sublime event interrupts through an overview of Zagajewski's more typical Dasein poems. Against this background, his sublime recovery poems emerge. They expand the meaning of human being (gerund) to include atemporal experiences – a virtual contradiction in terms considering that being happens in time and that time plays a strong role in Zagajewski's poetics. As a consequence, I argue, his sublime poems propose to the reader possible being that is non-ethical, asocial, and transcendent and that contrasts with Zagajewski's speaker's more usual ethical stance of praise. They also invite important questions about human consciousness that can reinvigorate our understanding of Dasein.

In chapter three, I examine the biological sublime, an interruption in Holub's organic, empirical context that typically acknowledges both failure and paradox in science, thought, and art. In response, poems act as intensive care for being by holding off the encroachment of non-being, which threatens in moments of failure or paradox. In "Transplantace Srdce," however, Holub's speaker adopts uncharacteristic language associated with sublime recovery and reaches unempirical, rational certainty about being's presence where non-being should be. This conclusion redefines the parameters of embodied being.

In chapter four, I begin with the civilizational sublime, to which Grossman's elaborate edifice of poetic theory and poems, on which he seeks to hang the value of persons, responds. The rupture in civilization is marked by Trinity, the first atomic explosion that entered social consciousness and ushered in the use of nuclear weapons and the ever-imminent threat to repeat sociability's utter failure. Grossman's search for a non-violent account of representation that protects sociability culminates in a collection of poems distinguished by their inclusion of others' speech, which I read as a poetics of courtesy that is not violent. Courtesy requires the simultaneous presence of both the speaker and the one who is offered a chance to speak; otherwise, it fails.

In the Coda, I discuss the relevance of my approach to other theories of the sublime, to the study of poetry, and to the philosophy of consciousness. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)