MA Comps II

Sobornost

the community not that you should just help other people or that its moral, you cant understand the truth unless you are united with the community. You alone do not see reality correctly by yourself, you have to be part of this commune in a deep deep sense: ifnot then you will see life wrong. Eg Levin is tormented by being alone...and he reads Xomikov but a Xomiov character knows he should get involved in the commmjity

Chatsky

the idealistic hero of Griboevdov's woe from with 1824. Herzen saw in Chatsky a portrayal of revolutionary patriotism, protest against despotism and the struggle for uniqueness in russian culture. - Chatsky is the kind enthusiatic suffering type of european russian who appeals to to mother russian and her native soil, only to depart for europe once again ( a place of refuge for injured feelings) recall that Herzen looked to russia for salvation and rejected europeanism herzen looks critcailly at the bourgeoius like Dostoevksy does who claims that all that is to them are" things" whats on the outside, how they look etc

Bely, Petersburg

1916 symbolist writing. Bely's writing is dense with references and unless you are overly familiar with the 1905 Russian Revolution, the Saint Petersburg Soviet, "The Queen of Spades" (the Pushkin short story and the Tchaikovsky opera), Zemvsto, the founding and general layout of the Saint Petersburg and its popular image in Russian writing, Russian politicians of the era, and the rise of bomb throwing Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, the lead senator in the Duma, wakes up and goes to his office. His pampered son Nikolai is given a mysterious parcel by a revolutionary confidant Alexandr Ivanovich Dudkin. Meanwhile a woman that Nikolai has a passive-aggressive non-relationship with, Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, is given a letter to pass on to him from a grotesque revolutionary leader name Lippanchenko. She does, to spite him. It tells Nikolai that he needs to kill his father with a time bomb that is contained within the parcel he was given by Dudkin. The ticking of the clock sets the final movements of the characters interactions, disastrous and combustive, towards the finale. It seems to take forever for this plot and the characters to reveal themselves. Through the use of familiar melodramatic devices like mistaken identities and unlikely coincidences, Bely gives narrative tugs that pull the reader from one section to the next. The bomb inherently creates tension, first in the reader discovering how it intends to be used and then in the reader wondering who will end up being damaged or killed by it. But the patience of the reader really pays off through the use of repetition in color, character, interior thought and place. Repetition can be very annoying, but here sets up musical themes that gradually start to play off each other in surprising thematic twists. The colors red, white, green, yellow, and purple/blue are used in descriptions to simultaneously convey information (red=revolutionary), emotion (a green mist invokes a suffocating menace), and raise thematic flags (white corresponds with a Christian mysticism that is occasionally overdone). The characters are defined and evoked by key traits - for example Nikolai's pale skin, "flaxen hair", and "frog-like lips" - used like a code so that we know a character is hiding on the periphery when these words are used. (Especially helpful since many of the characters have multiple aliases.) These patterns typically play off of each other in pairs. The make-up of Petersburg is presented as both one of straight lines laid on top of "cosmic infinity", echoing the city's founding as a pre-planned creation set down by Peter the Great over a swamp (and the novel's themes of bubbling darkness and chaos). The uncertainty of identity in a newly created cosmopolitan city is evoked through the use of varying place names: the Ableukhov's "Mongol" heritage, the "Mongoloids" also evoking the Russo-Japanese war on the empire's eastern boundaries, and Finland to the west is placed as a mysterious habitant of the green mists. As the characters are kept to a few defining descriptions, their interior thoughts are marked by specific themes that gradually coalesce into the book's larger themes. Historical figures haunt them: a bronze statue of Peter the Great seems to punish them and the Flying Dutchman threatens them with the curse of one who can never go home. Dudkin is constantly remembering a dark yellow stain on his wallpaper, "on which something fateful - is about to appear," while Nikolai enters reveries where he sees the bomb's explosion as revealing a dark emptiness and enacting the myth of Saturn, where the father devours his children and in turn is devoured by them. By piling everything on top of each other, through constant juxtaposition and repetition of ideas and imagery, Bely interweaves his exploration of father/son relationships, revolution, history and how we belong to it, destruction and transcendence, and an indifferent universe or compassionate god that might lie behind all of it. Yet ultimately this is a very pessimistic portrait of personal and societal evisceration. Petersburg is about one event as a perpetual moment in history, a constancy of new orders usurping old orders and children destroying and then becoming parents, the battle between liberty and repression, and how this can leave people feeling permanently uprooted and haunted by the past. This is not a story about whether or not the Russian revolution was a worthwhile endeavor, but it is eerily prescient in predicting how the initial euphoria, the bomb explosion of Communism, would scorch the earth as badly as any tsar did.

Andrei Bitov: Pushkin House

1988, hard to read, full of weird words - Pushkin House is the name of the literary institute in which the hero works; it is also Russian literature as a whole (''the house that Pushkin built''); and it is this book itself, which houses not only Pushkin, though he is its household god, but also Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky. Susan Brownsberger, the learned and resourceful translator, seems to think Nabokov is a principal model for ''Pushkin House,'' but it strikes me that the author this work most vividly recalls when at its eloquent and weird best is Dostoyevsky. Anyway, it is crammed with allusions to all these writers, expertly annotated by Ms. Brownsberger. The story - or rather the book - begins with the death of the hero, Lyova Odoevtsev, in a drunken duel. This is followed by an account of his childhood, boyhood and youth, curiously parallel to those of the author. They were both born in 1937, during the Stalinist purges; read Pushkin zealously in 1949, a time of renewed terror; finished high school in 1953, the year of Stalin's death. Both spent their time mainly in Leningrad, a city that figures richly in the book. Lyova's ''fatal'' drinking bout and duel occurs on the night of Nov. 7, 1967, the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, which happened before their time but still dominates their lives and gives them an oddly second-hand and flattened character. But ''Pushkin House'' is much more than a complaint about the dullness of contemporary Russian life. It is also a treatise on fiction, and Mr. Bitov incorporates quantities of theoretical speculation in the text of his novel. He seems obsessed with the idea that novelists can do exactly as they please. For example, they can recount a series of events, and then, if they so wish, point out that the matter could have been treated in an entirely different manner; they may then go on to do so, offering what the novel calls ''variants'' that may very well contradict or falsify the original version. If Mr. Bitov chooses - and he does choose - he can bring his hero Lyova back to life after his death by pistol shot. Not dead at all, he wakes up with a hangover (like everybody else in Leningrad on Nov. 8) and surveys the frightful destruction wrought by himself and his drunken companions in the Institute, the scene of their drunken party. Windows are broken, Pushkin's death mask is smashed to pieces. Lyova is now said, with an implausibility frankly acknowledged, to have collected workmen and repaired all the damage before his colleagues return to work on Nov. 9. They notice nothing. (The death mask wasn't after all unique; there are dozens in the basement.) How did he manage this on a public holiday? Well, the truth is the author did the cleaning and repairing with his pen. As if to confirm these insights, Lyova leads a rather vague and superfluous existence. He doesn't actually betray a friend, but conveniently happens not to be around when the friend is arrested. His relationships with women (very well portrayed - comic, sad and true) are full of willed self-delusion and lack emotional force. He is in thrall to a somewhat demonic proletarian called Mitishatyev, a crafty, envious fellow and an obsessed anti-Semite. Mitishatyev knows just how to get under Lyova's skin, and after a drunken argument he smashes the death mask and provokes the duel fought with Pushkin's pistols. Mr. Bitov is at his best, I think, in this climactic scene, the like of which it might be hard to find outside Dostoyevsky. Of course the duel is very literary, alluding to many famous duels in the Russian classics (that is, in Pushkin's house, where this duel is taking place). But the power comes from Mitishatyev's mad, fervid rhetoric. Here he is contrasting his proletarian background with Lyova's upper-class origins: ''We are many, and we're all of us alone: although we know and understand perfectly the mechanisms of life and each other's baseness, we have no strength, and each of us is too few! You people are few, but you're one, and each of you is not one man alone but many: although you don't understand, you are strong! And what you'll never be forgiven for is that you yielded to us, and deprived us of the right to recognize you. How you betrayed yourselves! Correctly, you should have been killed, liquidated; you disappointed us, you treated us villainously! Stinking humanism . . . What did you want with humanism? Why did you slavishly begin to guess our ideas and pretend you were bringing them to us, why did you convince us that we were people, when it's practically impossible to be a person in your sense . . . you never taught us the art and you've lost it yourselves. That's the true reason why I hate you - for my own love, for your betrayal!'' WHEREUPON Lyova confesses his aristocratic sin and begs forgiveness. But the author then interposes the remark that the greater the possibility of understanding between the two, the less they understood; and then he questions whether they really said all these things. ''Someday, just for fun, we'll write it all over again from the beginning.'' At the point where Mitishatyev ''kills'' Lyova, the opening pages of the book are repeated verbatim, as if the story had come full circle: here again is the gray, hung over Leningrad morning, the wind colored like an airplane. But this isn't the end (Bitov speculates a lot about ends) and the book has 50 pages more to go. They include a slightly embarrassed confrontation between the author and his hero. Though the novel's focus is a love affair between Lyova and Faina, the novel's true subject is an investigation of the corruption of Soviet intellectual life and history. Working within many of the confines imposed upon him during the Soviet regime, Bitov ingeniously draws upon Russian literary models, especially that of Nabokov, in order to parody and satirize the stifling society about him, as well as Russian literary tradition. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/31/nnp/pushkin.html

Emigre literature ( the stages)

1st Wave--after 1917 revolution; Babel 2nd 1920-1923--Tsvetaeva, Osorgin, Nabokov 3rd directly from Terras: after 1917 ( oct revolution ) paris became the emigre capitol of rus culture. early 1920's also berlin, prague, warsaw, helsinki.... russian authors in the west wrote in genres of: short story, the tale, novel, travel notes, memoirs, lyric poety, often to a philosophical bent and concerned w/ the basic tenets of freedom and christian optimism many left the soviet union when they realized the new gov would stifle their creativity ( control plots etc). among these were Balmont, bunin ( all diverse kinds of writers) Hippius, Merezhkovsky, Mayakovsky.... 1920-23 khodsevich, tsvetaeva, nabokov ...Zamyatin moved to paris 1931 russian emigres dispersed all over europe. the migration continued after WWII... the green lamp was an important literary group run by hippies and merezhkovsky the russian intellectual community abroad created a "conspisy" of sorts to sustain and further the development of russian -disticnt from the soviet -culture. echoes of russian symbolism acmeism and futurism can be found in the works of both the older and younger generations but there is also ample evidence of a common striving toward innovation. like the modernists at the turn off the century both generations advocated freedom from prevailing norms and rebelled against the dogmatic conception of art made fashionable by belnisky, dobriloobov, cherneyshhekvy, and their disciples in the soviet union emigre writers openly pleaded for idealism, christian optimism and resignation in protest of 19th c. radicals and their 20 c heirs.

Fathers and Sons

Bazarov, the central character in the novel, is a rebel. In popular American culture, we might equate him with James Dean, the young rebel without a cause. He's a bad boy with a magnetic personality, convinced he's going to be great even though he isn't sure why or how. He's the fighter that most of us are too timid (or wise) to be. And whether or not you know much about nihilism or nineteenth century Russian history, if you've lived through adolescence, you know something about what it is to be Bazarov. Turgenev so carefully depicts the family struggles at the heart of his novel that one can't help but come away from the book with a better understanding of what it means to be someone's child, someone's parent. Yet this is not a feel-good novel and there is no easy moral to take away from it. If a parent's goal is to make their child more docile and obedient, then Fathers and Sons probably isn't the right book to pass on because the story is propelled, above all, by the revolt of children against their parents. Fathers and Sons, published in 1862, was more than a breakout novel for Ivan Turgenev; it was a breakout novel for Russian literature as a whole. In its realism and its careful depiction of the rise of nihilism (a philosophy that takes no principle whatsoever for granted; everything is open to question), it anticipates the great Russian novels of the second half of the nineteenth century. Both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky were admirers of Turgenev, and one could argue that his little book did a great deal to open up the landscape that those two later authors would plow. When Fathers and Sons was released, however, it created a scandal that broke like a thunderstorm right over Turgenev's head. Conservative Russians read Turgenev's book and thought that he was glorifying nihilism through the character of Bazarov. Radical Russians read the book and were convinced that he was caricaturing the younger generation. In short, both groups went to the book and wanted to see their own opinions and beliefs right there on the page, but neither found them. It is, in a sense, a testament to the success of Turgenev's novel. He refuses to come down on one side or another, to offer a dogmatic bottom line. Put another way, ideology takes a back seat to art. Turgenev's goal is to depict the lives of his characters as carefully as he can, not to transmit a political message. The book is a fantastic piece of literature, but one might argue that it has become even more than that. It's almost impossible to speak of mid-nineteenth-century Russian history without a reference to Turgenev's novel. Any discussion of the growing liberalism of Russia, the move to emancipate the serfs in 1861, the anger and radicalism of the younger Russian generation, feels somehow abstract without Turgenev. What this means is that Turgenev's carefully crafted fiction has become part of the historical record. He took upon himself a role that not too many modern novelists are even ambitious enough to attempt: national elegist. - His personal struggle to understand what it meant to be a Russian circa 1860 was so well articulated that it became his country's. Of course, what has made his novel last is not just that it is a piece of Russian history, but that it has universal appeal. Parents relate to Nikolai Petrovich attempting to understand his son, and children relate to Arkady and Bazarov trying to surpass their fathers. More importantly, though, the novel exposes parents and children to the vantage point of the other, and by doing so, creates the possibility of empathy.

Russian literature nobel winners:

Bunin 1933 Pasternak 1958 Sholokhov 1965 Solzhenitsen 1970 Brodsky 1987 Svetlana Alexievich 2015 from belarus for literature (Gorbachev won it for peace in 1990)

Cherry orchard

Chekov 1901, Chekhov Chekhov's last play, intended as comedy; Stanislavsky directed as a tragedy, dual nature of the play last scene is of the old man named firs, who is forgotten by the others who all leave. he listened to the sound of all the cherry trees being chopped down The Cherry Orchard is on one level, a naturalistic play because it focuses on scientific, objective, details. It thus is like realism, in that it attempts to portray life "as it really is The orchard is the massive, hulking presence at the play's center of gravity; everything else revolves around and is drawn towards it. It is gargantuan; Lopakhin implies in Act One that the Lopakhin's estate spreads over 2,500 acres, and the cherry orchard is supposed to cover most of this. There were never any cherry orchards of nearly this size in Russia. And the fact that an orchard of this gargantuan size, which, by the estimate of Donald Rayfield, would produce more than four million pounds of cherries each crop, cannot economically sustain Ranevksy is an absurdity. But it is absurd for a reason. After all, the orchard used to produce a crop every year, which was made into cherry jam. But, as Firs informs us, now the recipe has been lost. It is thus a relic of the past, an artifact, of no present use to anyone except as a memorial to or symbol of the time in which it was useful. And its unrealistic size further indicates that it is purely a symbol of that past. In a very real sense, the orchard does not exist in the present

C.F Cherneshevky's view of art, with Tolstoy's

Chernyshevsky believed that art should first and foremost serve a social purpose by showing how things should be, and thus help make those ideas a reality. His criterion for artistic beauty, therefore, was how much the artwork helped to bring about social change. His three main protagonists - Vera, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov - were intended to show how men and women could live together in equality, respecting their equal rights. This concept is also applicable to differing social classes.

Bely's Petersburg II

Petersburg, Andrei Bely's best-known novel, is difficult to pigeon-hole. Except for a brief flash-forward epilogue, its events unfold over a ten-day period in the early autumn of 1905, not long before that year's ineffectual revolution culminated in the Manifesto of 30 October (17 October in the Russian calendar). Its characters are men and women "of uncertain status," shadowy revolutionaries and anarchists, and the aristocratic government functionaries whose wayward offspring are drawn into their web. Unsurprisingly therefore, it puts one in mind of novels like Turgenev's Virgin Soil and, especially, Dostoyevsky's Devils. Indeed, the highest ranking government official we meet, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov (henceforth AAA), in his obsessive-compulsive behavior, domestic disarray and ultimate inability to handle stress, recalls Lembke, his provincial counterpart in Devils. But Petersburg's debt to Dostoyevsky is superficial —else, one presumes, Nabokov would not have ranked it as "one of the four most important works of twentieth-century literature." Instead of Dostoyevsky's standard ploy of a naïve chronicler within the frame of the novel, Petersburg is told throughout from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator of prodigious poetic gifts. And poetry is at the very heart of Petersburg, from the level of individual lines to its broader structure. Its eight massive chapters are subdivided into numerous short vignettes and dramatic scenes, each with its own title. These sub-chapters often unfold like lyric poems. Each has its own refrain, usually quoted in the title, which may be anywhere from a line fragment to a short paragraph in length. Commonly, the refrain returns to close a section. Some sections have multiple refrains and some treat them as subjects for variation. Now, one might expect this fusion of poetic and narrative structure to be problematic; My initial reactions to some of the longer repetitions included wondering if my eye had strayed back to an earlier passage and thinking I had discovered a gross misprint. But after adjusting to the rhythm of the book, I began to embrace the technique and to increasingly admire the ingenuity with which poetry and narrative were fused—to see that what might have become a distracting fetish was, in fact, a flexible and ingenious technique with multifarious narrative functions. Some refrains, for example, are merely atmospheric, capturing a state of nature—gloom or mist, the play of light on rooftops, or so on—that infuses the experience of a character throughout a scene. The repetition in these cases reflects the characters' continual perceptual awareness of these phenomena as well as the rhythms with which they reoccur to consciousness as attention shifts focus or wanders. Other refrains function variously as Idees fixes, expressions of obsessive fears (like AAA's recurring quasi-hallucination of a mustachioed bomber outside his carriage), or incantations. In most cases, however, I came to find deep psychological truth in the repetitions and to realize that my initial bemused reactions were just the residue of ingrained habits and narrative conventions. Examples of Bely's descriptive genius and singular vision are ubiquitous; I'll cite just two. Like Dostoyevsky's Devils, the revolutionaries in Petersburg become more absorbed in infighting and personal enmity than in any sort of principled action. One such scene ends in violence, at night in a small room by murky candlelight. Most of the violent imagery in the scene is performed by a "huge, fat shadow-man, emerging from under ______'s feet" who begins "to dance around with fretful movements," or springs from his head and hangs from the ceiling, while the act of violence itself is disorienting in its calm and in the victim's startled and frozen contemplation of its new sensations; Thus the play of shadows overshadows the fatal stroke. Elsewhere Bely develops with hallucinatory power the extended metaphor of a paper war conducted at "the certain establishment" where AAA is the obsessive-compulsive field-marshal. The narrative dimension of the novel is equally well developed, though those expecting a novel of political intrigue are apt to find the pacing slow. Two of the main characters who figure prominently in the beginning, AAA and his son, the student Nikolai, are drawn with cold detachment—more like inanimate objects than persons. They believe each other to be scoundrels. AAA is a husk of his former self because two years earlier his wife had abandoned him for an Italian singer. Nikolai is tormented with unrequited love for Sofia Petrovna, who is married to an army officer named Likhutin. Sofia holds a sort of salon frequented by riff raff and revolutionaries, entertaining in a kimono and decorating with paintings of Mount Fuji, which is significant given that Russia is at that time enmired in a disastrous war with Japan. In his despair, Nikolai acts out and pledges his service to a revolutionary cabal represented at first by his contact, Alexander Ivanovich Dubkin. A bomb enters the scene. It is left ominously ticking for nearly two hundred pages. One character, in a hybrid allusion to Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman" and the short play Stone Guest, is visited in his garret by a "bronze guest," the dismounted figure of Peter the Great. There is attempted suicide, patricidal conspiracy, madness, murder, betrayal, riots in the street suppressed by Cossacks—but in the end the strongest through-line proves, unexpectedly, to be that of an understated and deeply insightful domestic drama.

The Government Inspector Summary

The governor Anton Antonovich Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky collected all the officials of the city and reported that he had received a letter from his friend, from which he learned that in their city was going to become a government inspector, and incognito. The governor gave everyone a mandate to put in order all the government offices - the court, the hospital, etc. It turns out that in court, directly in the reception guard they have been brooding geese. The mayor is afraid that someone would report on him, so he called the postmaster Ivan Kuzmich Shpekin and asked him to open gently the letters and to read, and then again to seal and report to him. It turns out that the postmaster has been doing so for long, and even those letters that he liked he left. Into the room burst country squires - Piotr Ivanovich Dobchinsky and Piotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky saying excitedly that in a local restaurant stayed a young man, an official named Ivan Aleksandrovich Khlestakov. He behaves strangely, lived for two weeks, and did not pay the money. Well, they have concluded that this must have been a government inspector. From his servant Osip it became known that Khlestakov is traveling from St. Petersburg to Saratov. On the way, he lost all his money for gambling and is left without a penny, and got stuck in this restaurant: has nothing to pay, cannot go on his way. The host does not provide lunch in debt demanding money. When Khlestakov learns the governor came to him, he decides that the owner of the restaurant had already complained, and now he would be led to prison. Khlestakov beforehand is rehearsing an angry speech, which is going to tell the governor. When the door opens, Khlestakov pales and shrinks. At first he stutters little, but by the end of the speech says loudly that would pay everything. And say that the owner gives him not fresh beef, thus complaining on the services of the restaurant. The governor takes it personally, apologizes, saying that the beef is always fresh in the market. He offers to move to a more comfortable apartment. Khlestakov takes it for a hint of prison, and threatens that he would complain to the Minister. When the governor learns that Khlestakov needs money, the offers a loan, but instead of two gives four hundred rubles. Khlestakov calmed down. The governor again starts talking about the other apartment offering Khlestakov to move in with him. The last agrees. Before he took a room in the house of the governor, Khlestakov examines the government offices at the request of the governor, although a little surprised what it is for. When viewing the hospital Khlestakov asks why there are so few patients, and the superintendent of charities Artemy Filippovich Zemlianika explains that ever since he took the command everyone recovers like fly. The patient just enters the hospital he is already recovered, and no so much because of the much medication but because of much honesty and order. Khlestakov somewhat is bored the inspection, and he asks if there are any entertainment companies, where it would be possible to play cards. The governor says in fear that they never had such places. Luka Lukich, the inspector of schools, retorted aside: "And he, a scoundrel, yesterday won a hundred rubles." They come in the governor's house. The governor introduces the inspector to his wife and a daughter of marriageable age. They begin to ask the guest about how he lives. Khlestakov, realizing that he is taken for some of a high official, starts to lie brazenly, saying that in the capital absolutely everyone knows him, that he often has dinner with a minister, and even once he asked to run the department. After his story everyone became numb, they do not even know how to address him. At a time when Khlestakov is sleeping everyone in the house go on tiptoe. Officials decided to slip Khlestakov a bribe and sent with this purpose Amos Fedorovich, the judge, as he commands the language, he had "every single word, is the language of Cicero" During the visit, Amos Fedorovich accidentally drops the money. Khlestakov raises and asks to lend them. Next comes the postmaster, Khlestakov also borrows from him. Only Artemy Filippovich Zemlianika says about the real state of things. Khlestakov borrows from him as well. Left alone, Khlestakov decides to write about all this to the journalist so he could publish an article in the newspaper. Khlestakov says in a letter about everything that happened to him. Khlestakov hears some noises; merchants come to him with a complaint against the governor. Khlestakov is listening to them carefully and promises to help. The scene in the living room. Khlestakov and Marya Antonovna, the governor's daughter, are sitting nearby. Khlestakov pulls the chair closer, then she pushes hers away, and so several times. Then he kisses her on the shoulder. She angrily gets up and makes an offended look. He falls to his knees and says it's all because of love to her. At this time Anna Andreyevna enters finding such a scene. She asks to explain what's going on here and says her daughter to leave. Khlestakov himself notes that the mother is not ugly as well, he rushes to his knees and also declares his love to her. At this time Marya Antonovna enters seeing the scene, her eyes are welling with tears. Khlestakov rushes to her, asking her to marry him. It becomes known that the wedding is planned. Khlestakov says that he needs to go for one day to his uncle and leaves. The governor summons merchants, announces them that Khlestakov will soon be his son in law, and for the fact that they complained about him, they will not have good. Merchants are asking for forgiveness. Postmaster appears with a message that Khlestakov is not a government inspector. He read a letter which he sent to the journalist. The Governor is in horror. At that moment enters a gendarme and demands the governor to the officer, who had just arrived from St. Petersburg. the last scene is the "breaking the fourth wall": Mayor, after years of bamboozling banter Governors and shaking down criminals of every description, is enraged to have been thus humiliated. He screams at his cronies, stating that they, not himself, are to blame. At this moment, the famous fourth-wall breaking phrase is uttered by the Mayor to the audience: "What are you laughing about? You are laughing about yourselves!" While the cronies continue arguing, a message arrives from the real Government Inspector, who is demanding to see the Mayor immediately.

Dostoevsky style:

The themes in the writings of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which encompass novels, novellas, short stories, essays, epistolary novels, poetry,[1] spy fiction[2] and suspense,[3] include suicide, poverty, human manipulation and morality. Religious themes are found throughout his works, especially after his release from prison in 1854. His early works emphasised realism and naturalism, as well as social issues such as the differences between the poor and the rich. though sometimes described as a Literary realist, a genre characterized by its depiction of contemporary life in its everyday reality, Dostoevsky saw himself as a "fantastic realist".[5] According to Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky wanted "to introduce the extraordinary into the very thick of the commonplace, to fuse... the sublime with the grotesque, and push images and phenomena of everyday reality to the limits of the fantastic."[6] Grossman saw Dostoevsky as the inventor of an entirely new novelistic form, in which an artistic whole is created out of profoundly disparate genres—the religious text, the philosophical treatise, the newspaper, the anecdote, the parody, the street scene, the grotesque, the pamphlet—combined within the narrative structure of an adventure novel.[7] Dostoevsky engages with profound philosophical and social problems by using the techniques of the adventure novel as a means of "testing the idea and the man of the idea".[8] Characters are brought together in extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of the philosophical ideas by which they are dominated.[9] For Mikhail Bakhtin, 'the idea' is central to Dostoevsky's poetics, and he called him the inventor of the polyphonic novel, in which multiple "idea-voices" co-exist and compete with each other on their own terms, without the mediation of a 'monologising' authorial voice. It is this innovation, according to Bakhtin, that made the co-existence of disparate genres within an integrated whole artistically successful in Dostoevsky's case.[10] Bakhtin argues that Dostoyevsky's works can be placed in the tradition of menippean satire. According to Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky revived satire as a genre combining comedy, fantasy, symbolism, adventure, and drama in which mental attitudes are personified. The short story Bobok, found in A Writer's Diary, is "one of the greatest menippeas in all world literature", but examples can also be found in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, the first encounter between Raskolnikov and Sonja in Crime and Punishment, which is "an almost perfect Christianised menippea", and in "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor".[11] Critic Harold Bloom stated that "satiric parody is the center of Dostoyevsky's art."[12] Dostoyevsky investigated human nature. According to his friend, the critic Nikolay Strakhov, "All his attention was directed upon people, and he grasped at only their nature and character", and was "interested by people, people exclusively, with their state of soul, with the manner of their lives, their feelings and thoughts". Philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev stated that he "is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimenter, a creator of an experimental metaphysics of human nature". His characters live in an unlimited, irrealistic world, beyond borders and limits. Berdyaev remarks that "Dostoevsky reveals a new mystical science of man", limited to people "who have been drawn into the whirlwind".[

Significance of Sketches from a Hunter's Album (1852)

The work as a whole actually led to Turgenev's house arrest (part of the reason, the other being his epitaph to Gogol) at Spasskoye. It was also partially responsible for the abolishment of serfdom in Russia. It was also Turgenev's first major writing that gained him recognition. He wrote this collection of short stories based on his own observations while hunting at his mother's estate at Spasskoye, where he learned of the abuse of the peasants and the injustices of the Russian system that constrained them. The frequent abuse on Turgenev from his mother led to his hatred of tyranny, and certainly had an effect on this work. The stories were first published in The Contemporary with each story separate before appearing in 1852 in book form. He was about to give up writing when the first story, Khor and Khalinich, was well received. This work is part of the Realist tradition in that the narrator is usually an uncommited observer of the people he meets. The work as a whole actually led to Turgenev's house arrest (part of the reason, the other being his epitaph to Gogol) at Spasskoye. It was also partially responsible for the abolishment of serfdom in Russia

Symbolism vs futurism:

The world of objects is not the real world = symbolism= manifesting Zuam transrationalism / zuam is what the futurists believed in A new sensibility can be achieved if Objects can be reassembled into new ones = zakliete smexom

что делать

What Is To Be Done? (Russian: Что делать?, tr. Chto delat'?; also translated as "What Shall We Do?") is an 1863 novel written by the Russian philosopher, journalist and literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky. It was written in response to Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev. Reactions to the novel: Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in his 1864 novella Notes from Underground, as well as in his 1872 novel Devils. Leo Tolstoy wrote a different What Is to Be Done?, published in 1886, based on his own ideas of moral responsibility.[6] Vladimir Lenin, however, found it inspiring and named a 1902 pamphlet "What Is to Be Done?". Lenin is said to have read the book five times in one summer, and according to Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Joseph Frank, 'Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.' [7] Vladimir Nabokov's final novel in Russian, The Gift, thoroughly ridiculed What is to Be Done? in its fourth chapter. The story begins with Vera Pavlovna living under the rule of her oppressive mother who wants to marry her off to the son of their tenement block owner. However, Vera has many other aspirations of her own and longs to be free from her household. She becomes friends with her younger brother's tutor, Lopukhov, with whom she has philosophical discussions spurred on by the books Lopukhov suggests she read. The two eventually realize that Lopukhov can save Vera from a loveless marriage and a lifelong servitude to her family by marrying her, and he does so, snatching her out from under the nose of her mother and unwanted suitor. The newlyweds set up house together in a thoroughly planned out manner: each with a separate bedroom that can only be entered by the other with permission, and a communal "neutral" room for eating, drinking tea, etc. With this egalitarian setup, Vera feels liberated from what she called "the cellar", or her previous life of oppression. c.f Mayakovsky and Lilia Brik ( wife of Joseph Brik the poet) love triangle in the Cherneshevskian vein. The two made a pact to love each other "in the Chernyshevsky manner" - Through lengthy talks with Lopukhov, Vera decides to set up a small business as a seamstress in order to gain financial independence, reinforcing their desire for equality among the sexes. Vera runs her business as a cooperative, with all the women living together and sharing the profits. The descriptions of the workshops and lodging houses they create are long and detailed, and advocate the possibility of utopian working and living spaces fueled by the idea that one's own personal self-interest converges with that of the group, creating the best conditions for the individual and for the common good. Vera soon falls in love with Lopukhov's friend and classmate, Kirsanov. Lopukhov realizes that his marriage to Vera was only in order to help her achieve her independence, and that now he stands in the way of real love. With the help of an extraordinary man, Rakhmetov, Lopukhov "removes himself from the scene" so as not to block Vera and Kirsanov's happiness. Eventually, Kirsanov and Vera marry, and live happily together for the rest of the novel. Chernyshevsky believed that art should first and foremost serve a social purpose by showing how things should be, and thus help make those ideas a reality. His criterion for artistic beauty, therefore, was how much the artwork helped to bring about social change. His three main protagonists - Vera, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov - were intended to show how men and women could live together in equality, respecting their equal rights. This concept is also applicable to differing social classes. As characters, rather than having real depth, they are more emblems of an ideal. The portrait of Rakhmetov is intended to show the ideal revolutionary, and to describe the process of becoming committed to the Revolution. The narrator even specifically tells the reader that Rakhmetov's purpose is to show how ordinary the other characters are: "No, my friends, it is not they who stand too high, it is you who stand too low." Vera and the men are models for the reader, and Rakhmetov is a model for them, personifying the spirit and commitment necessary for a revolution. By illustrating the concept that Vera and the men are in fact ordinary, Chernyshevsky also tries to emphasize the attainability of his goals. Vera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream, arguably the most famous and radical part of the novel, shows the coming Golden Age to be achieved by revolution. An agrarian utopia, the aftermath of the revolution, is depicted along with the symbolic crystal palace, and image of technological modernity. Go to The Revolution to read our take on the fourth dream and missing section. His vision of Russia after the Revolution is that of a social utopia, modeled after Charles Fourier's phalansterian colonies. The government coercion has vanished, the whole country is carpeted with flowering gardens and people eat, live and love in an absolute equality and blissful togetherness. Before the final consummation, however, lies a period of revolutionary struggle, on which Chernyshevsky remains rather vague due to censor restrictions, depriving the reader of any explicit blueprint for action and perhaps misguiding his audience, which was eager for socio-political change. The seventh section of Vera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream, the very component which in all probability intended to describe the potential revolutionary plan, is rendered blank. This we saw as an unlimited arena for speculation and an exercise in synthesizing Chernyshevsky's personal aesthetic persuasions with his literary imagination. Thus, the idea of completing the novel with our own interpretation of the author's vision of the revolution in English and Russian was born, and after extensive collective historio-biographical research and creative brainstorming, we produced a very interesting outcome.

Zamytins we

like diary entries, (c.f. poor folk) the titles are fragmented like thoughts, this was done by Zamyatin on purpose. also compare chto delaet the greens are peasants and the blacks are anarchists c.f Bugaev/ Andrei Bely petersburg b/c shapes nothing is square... god building building the soviet man t's not exactly surprising that earlier in his career Zamyatin edited H. G. Wells' utopian writings for Russian publication, and it's not a stretch to see the rationalism that permeates We as influenced by Wells' investment in a benevolent rational (alien) overlord to rule over, and when necessary expunge, irrational human nature. Like most great Russian writers, Zamyatin was also influenced by Dostoyevsky, and in We we see another answer to the Grand Inquisitor: the question that Ivan poses to Alyosha, and the Inquisitor himself poses to Christ, the question Le Guin answers in "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas": freedom or happiness? Which do you choose if you can only choose one? In We, set one thousand years after the One State's rise, the Inquisitor's choice has been made, and the bargain has come down squarely on the side of happiness at the cost of freedom. Everyone is scrupulously equal. Everyone dresses the same, everyone lives in the same kind of glass-boxed apartment; there is no art; sex is proscribed and rationed, reproduction controlled by the State, and all references to life outside the gray urban walls—the worlds of nature and of imagination—strictly forbidden. Our protagonist, D-503, lives his contented existence designing spacecraft. The same mathematic specificity that guides his engineering—rigid, straight-lined rationality, is set askew when he meets the wildly irrational I-330. Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984 follows D-503's path from love into rebellion, at least until the State gets control again. And then, of course, there are shapes and colors. Zamyatin came to artistic maturity during the Expressionist era in art, and shares in Expressionist aesthetics. Straight lines, rationality, symmetry, science, and mathematics are all associated with the State. Curves, irrationality, asymmetry, passion, and poetry are all associated with the Rebellion, Inside the wall is civilization; outside is nature. Certain colors are associated with themes and/or specific characters. In general, grays and metallic shades are associated with the repressive state, greens with art, wildness and life. Pink is affiliated most closely to D-503's assigned lover, O-90, and red with I-330, D's real lover. Black is the color associated with the Ancient House, and with imagination and all the subversion inherent in art. Expressionist art; expressionist novel. Which is interesting, arresting, informative, provocative. Drawing on influences as disparate as Milton's Paradise Lost and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, one foot in the past and eyes fixed firmly on the distant future, Zamyatin would be a curiosity (like Wells' utopian fictions) were it not for the strength of his narrative.

Daniil Kharms

Modernist, Id say... 1905 - 2 February 1942) was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist, embraced futurism, In 1928, Daniil Kharms founded the avant-garde collective Oberiu, or Union of Real Art. He embraced the new movements of Russian Futurism laid out by his idols, Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, and Igor Terentiev, among others. Their ideas served as a springboard. His aesthetic centered around a belief in the autonomy of art from real world rules and logic, and that intrinsic meaning is to be found in objects and words outside of their practical function. link to Staruka, http://chneukirchen.org/tmp/www.geocities.com/Athens/8926/Kharms/Kh_E_OW.html

How is Russia postmodernism different from Russian modernism? Define the terms, use at least two examples of each period to illustrate your argument

Modernists ~ 1900-1925 wanted to create a better world out of the rubble of WWI, but they never consulted the people who would be living in them, and thus they created uncomfortable places to live Much focus on the senses according to Clowes' ( re modernism) e.g. sounds noises drums ect so you get overwhelmed ( the reader ) with all this rtistic synthesisism, forceful expression of individuality, experimenting with what others have not done before. Experimentation. vs Postmodernists according to Linda Hutcheon—Poetics of post-modernism "What postmodernism does, as its very name suggests, is confront and contest any modernist discarding or recuperating of the past in the name of the future. It suggests no search for transcendent timeless meaning, but rather a re-evaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present." Postmodernism is "the contradictions of modernism in an explicitly political light." (24) o The past is not pushed to the side, but rather "incorporated and modified, given new and different life and meaning." (24) · Ironic parody in architecture (25) · Postmodernism does not negate modernism, but "what it does do is interpret it freely; it 'critically reviews it for its glories and its errors.'" (30) · (34) Parody as a link between art and world. · (35) "Postmodernist parody, be it in architecture, literature, painting, film, or music, uses its historical memory, its aesthetic introversion, to signal that this kind of self-reflexive discourse is always inextricably bound to social discourse." · Historiographic metafiction—reworking of history using both historical events and fiction. · Postmodernism mainly challenges institutions—ranging from media to the university to museums to theatres.

Pyotr Chaadayev

-During the 1840s Chaadayev was an active participant in the Moscow literary circles. 1794 - 1856 - Russian phiolsopher,He befriended Alexander Pushkin and was a model for Chatsky, the chief protagonist of Alexander Griboyedov's play Woe from Wit (1824). He traveled around europe a lot and was not home when the decemberist uprising occurred but when he returned he was questioned. born and died in moscow -The main thesis of his famous Philosophical Letters was that Russia had lagged behind Western countries and had contributed nothing to the world's progress and concluded that Russia must start de novo. As a result, they included criticism of Russia's intellectual isolation and social backwardness. after this letter he was deemed a madman and placed under house arrest. there, he wrote another letter, aptly, entitled " apology of a madman"

Khor and Kalinych: who wrote it and whats it about?

1. Khor and Kalinych: Story of two peasants, one who is thrifty and the other who is an idealist who both work for a petty landowner named Polutykin. This introduces the role of the narrator as the uncommitted observer. Turgenev at once appears as a writer and an artist but also a social reformer and activist. The separation of the two peasants plays a big role in later works by the author, as he explained in a speech given in 1860 where he talks about the dichotomy of his Hamlet-like and Quixotic characters. The main idea here though is displaying the intelligence of the peasants and the idiocy of their master. It is also perhaps one of his strongest arguments in favor of Westernization in Russia.

Brodsky and VN

1940-1991 they never met: In his Nobel Prize lecture Brodsky sketches out an aesthetic credo on the basis of which an ethical public life might be built. Aesthetics, he says, is the mother of ethics, in the sense that making fine aesthetic discriminations teaches one to make fine ethical discriminations. Good art is thus on the side of good. Evil, on the other hand, 'especially political evil, is always a bad stylist.' (At moments like this Brodsky finds himself closer to his illustrious Russo-American precursor, the patrician Vladimir Nabokov, than he might wish to be.)" From the Nabokov Archives

Bailiff:

1Sketches from a Hunter's Album (1852) Story about the bailiff (Sofron) of a landowner friend of the narrator who is more in control of the land than Arkady Penochkin. He uses the peasants and steals their money from loans. This story was an angreement, though not explicitly, of a letter written in response to Gogol's Slavophile tendencies. This story is one of the most vivid examples of the peasantry's exploitation.

Khomyakov

Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov (Russian: Алексе́й Степа́нович Хомяко́в) 1804- 1860, Moscow) He cofounded the Slavophile movement along with Ivan Kireyevsky, and he became one of its most distinguished theoreticians. was a Russian theologian, philosopher, poet and amateur artist. Khomyakov's whole life was centred on Moscow. He viewed this "thousand-domed city" as the epitome of the Russian way of life. Equally successful as a landlord and conversationalist, he published very little during his lifetime. His writings, printed posthumously by his friends and disciples, exerted a profound influence on the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian lay philosophers, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and Vladimir Solovyov. Alexander Herzen's My Past and Thoughts contains a delightful characterisation of Khomyakov. For Khomyakov, socialism and capitalism were equally repugnant offspring of Western decadence. The West failed to solve human spiritual problems, as it stressed competition at the expense of co-operation. In his own words, "Rome kept unity at the expense of freedom, while Protestants had freedom but lost unity".[1] Khomyakov's own ideals revolved around the term sobornost, the Slavonic equivalent of catholicity found in the Nicene Creed; it can be loosely translated as "togetherness" or "symphony". Khomyakov viewed the Russian obshchina as a perfect example of sobornost and extolled the Russian peasants for their humility. Khomyakov died from cholera, infected by a peasant he had attempted to treat. He was buried next to his brother-in-law, Nikolai Yazykov, and another disciple, Nikolai Gogol, in the Danilov Monastery. The Soviets arranged for their disinterment and had them reburied at the new

Сюжет- Plot,

Aristotle states that plot is the most basic feature of the narrative, and that good stories must have a beginning, middle, and end and that they give pleasure b/c of the rhythm of their ordering. Plot is the most important element, in Aristotle's view. I. A plot requires transformation. a. E.g. there must be an initial situation, a change involving some sort of reversal, and a resolution that marks the change as significant. b. This change may involve a move from one relationship between characters, to its opposite or from a fear of prediction to its realization or its inversion from a problem to a solution or from a false accusation/ misrepresentation to rectification. c. A mere sequence of events does not make a story. There must be an end relating back to the beginning. d. Some theorists suggest that the end is the result of the desire or what happened to it, in the events that the story narrates. e. Plots can be summarized and readers can notice that two works are versions of the same story, as we did with Пиковая Дама, Старука, и Бедная Лиза. f. The theory of narrative suggests that the existence of a level of structure or plot is independent of any particular language or representational medium. g. Unlike poetry, plot is not lost in translation. E.g. a silent film can have the same plot as a short story. Literary theory; Culler p.85 :

Отцы Дети ( Summary)

Arkady Kirsanov has just graduated from the University of Petersburg and returns with a friend, Bazarov, to his father's modest estate in an outlying province of Russia. The father gladly receives the two young men at his estate, called Marino, but Nikolai's brother, Pavel, soon becomes upset by the strange new philosophy called "nihilism" which the young men advocate. Nikolai feels awkward with his son at home, partially because Arkady's views have dated his own beliefs, and partially because he has taken a servant, Fenichka, into his house to live with him and has already had a son by her. The two young men remain at Marino for a short time, then decide to visit a relative of Arkady's in a neighboring province. There they observe the local gentry and meet Madame Odintsova, an elegant woman of independent means who invites them to spend a few days at her estate, Nikolskoe. At Nikolskoe, they also meet Katya, Madame Odintsova's sister, who attracts Arkady. They remain for a short period and Bazarov is more and more drawn toward Madame Odintsova, until he finally announces that he loves her. She does not respond to his declaration, and soon after, Arkady and Bazarov leave for Bazarov's home. At Bazarov's home, they are received enthusiastically by his parents. Bazarov is still disturbed by his rejection, and is difficult to get along with. He almost comes to blows with his friend Arkady. After a brief stay, they decide to return to Marino, and circle by to see Madame Odintsova, who receives them coolly. They leave almost immediately and return to Arkady's home. Arkady remains for only a few days, and makes an excuse to leave in order to see Katya. Bazarov stays at Marino to do some scientific research, and tension between him and Pavel increases. Bazarov enjoys talking with Fenichka and playing with her child, and one day he gives her a quick, harmless kiss which is observed by Pavel. The older man feels it is his duty to defend his brother's honor, and he challenges Bazarov to a due]. Pavel is wounded slightly, and Bazarov must leave Marino. He stops for an hour or so at Madame Odintsova's, then continues on to his parents' home. Meanwhile, Arkady and Katya have fallen in love and have become engaged. At home, Bazarov cannot keep his mind on his work and while performing an autopsy fails to take the proper precautions. He contracts typhus, and on his deathbed, sends for Madame Odintsova, who arrives in time to hear Bazarov tell her how beautiful she is. Arkady marries Katya and takes over the management of his father's estate. His father marries Fenichka and is delighted to have his son home with him. Pavel leaves the country and lives the rest of his life as a "noble" in Dresden, Germany.

Napoleon Tolstoy and Dostoevksy

so you have a bildungsroman in tolstoy but not one in dostoekvys 1865 Napoleon 3rd wrote of his great grandfather published "history of Julius caesar" he argued that providence created great men such as julius caeser charlemagne and naopeolen etc to pave the path for men to follow. russian imperial press, before it was shut down by the censor, in the contemproy ( a journal) the story was published and commented that: if there are men of destiny, then they are governed by a different set of morals and logics and what criteria would you judge the actions of them with ordinary men? enter dostoevsky and tolstoy: e.g. c+P is it moral to kill? we see the echoed all through c and p. embodied in the form of raskolnikov. dost was preoccupied with the apocalyptic dread of socialism so he used the napoleon them to show" forgivable in men of destiny" that is murder so he's meditating on the nature of personal evil and prophezying for what it to come dost seems to accept this despite his moral protestaions he shows through terror and melodrama that its possible/ plausible for such a character to exist. recall Raskolnikov is only "saved" by sonya the prostitute dost accepts the idea that there are indeed men who can change history. but tolstoy throughout w+P seem to argue with dost aescticially that is: pierre bezukov is totally not like raskolnikov , he's not a crazed murderer : he is idealistc at the start of the novel and believes that napoleon is a great deliverer of mankind he even imagines himself to be napoleon / he gets carried away. toslty idealizes bezukov who seems to sit back and let things happen , let the french into moscow lets it burn b/c the sprit of the great russian people and the russian winter this is just one small way that tolstoy distances himself from the idea that one man can change history in w and peace. Bezukov ( goes throught a bildungsroman whereas raskolnikov does not ) through some horrific experiences and is transformed from a wild and crazy party boy into a mature husband and father. Raskonikov's redemption comes from a prostitue and is he really redeemed? Id say no. The quotation at the beginning of this chapter encapsulates one of the most important points of this book: That major events, like wars, are consequences of history, not consequences of actions by individual politicians. The Napoleonic wars that engulfed Europe at that time would have occurred with or without Napoleon. In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. -- Lev Tolstoy, in War and Peace Back in Tolstoy's day, Napoleon was thought of as just about the world's greatest general. That made the Russian army's victory over the invading French truly extraordinary. After all, not just anybody can defeat the greatest military commander in history. For Tolstoy, though, this kind of thinking was exactly what fueled the wrong-headed "great man" method of history - finding one supposedly awesome guy and then basing all analysis of the times on what he did or didn't do. he takes Napoleon down a notch in war and peace instead of elevating him, in a sense, as dostoekvy did. Instead, by putting Napoleon into War and Peace - giving him dialogue and describing his weird habits (like pulling his favorites by the ear) - Tolstoy can take Napoleon down a few notches. We can see Napoleon not just as a myth but as a human being. Once we see that he had just as many foibles and made just as many mistakes as anyone else, we are free to look at other explanations for our historical theories. Which is exactly what Tolstoy wants us to do There are hundreds of named characters, and Tolstoy shows their interrelations and how wartime affects and interferes with their lives. Characters who start out as carefree youth grow in responsibility and maturity as they suffer the horrors of war. In the end, love and marriage seem to represent man's redemption. this is the bildungsroman which we don't have in c+P instead you have Sonya the prostitute... Tolstoy understood mathematics and science, and used that understanding to show how great events in history by momentum rather than by politicians or generals, even a general as powerful as Napoleon. Tolstoy was angry about historical inaccuracies, it was the whole system of historical writing. about napoleon he actually got hold of letter written by him and went to the real battlefield Back then, the "great man" theory of history reigned supreme. Basically, whenever something big happened, you were supposed to look around for the most awesome leader and give all the credit or blame to him. Tolstoy thought that was just idiotic, since leaders don't just materialize out of thin air but are the products of their time. Events are necessarily very much the result of all the other events that lead up to them. Tolstoy's two major points are: 1) historians should think not just about the big names like Napoleon, but also about the forces that shaped them and the events that allowed them to take power; and 2) even the most seemingly insignificant people can affect history, by following or not following orders, for example, or delivering or not delivering a message. And that's actually how modern historians conceive of history, so Tolstoy was ahead of his time.

Fabula

Fabula is the chronological order of the book e.g. hero of our time is a good example. Maxzim M is the actually "end" of the book. So, its taman, pricness mary, fatalist, bela Maxim Maximovich, the order of the diary and the diary comes first. I. Фабула / Story line or narrative: a. E.g. Types of story lines we encounter: pre-history, oral tales shared between generations, myths, legends, storytelling in myths and legends to explain the seeming chaos of natural forces and the unexplained. Narratives can involve communicating political intentions surreptitiously or not (Russian literature has a wealth of this), and can be found in all genres e.g. mystery, satire, comedy, drama, science fiction etc. b. Fabula is everywhere and it is dynamic. A story is an example of a snapshot in time. Фабула= Сюжетная линия ( story line) в повествовании ( in the narrative) Ha Preemera, устные рассказы ( oral tales), греческий миф ( greek myth) and its dyamic or динамический.

Platonov:

Finished in 1930, the novel was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987 due to censorship. the Foundation Pit (Russian: Котлован, kotlovan) is a gloomy symbolic and semi-satirical novel by Andrei Platonov. The plot of the novel concerns a group of workers living in the early Soviet Union. They attempt to dig out a huge foundation pit on the base of which a gigantic house will be built for the country's proletarians. The workers dig each day but slowly cease to understand the meaning of their work. The enormous foundation pit sucks out all of their physical and mental energy. In terms of creative works, Platonov depicted one of the first state-controlled dystopias of the 20th century. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. However, both English novels were published long before a translation of The Foundation Pit became available.[citation needed] Platonov's work is a representation of the conflict that arose between Russian individuals and the increasingly collectivized Soviet state in the late 1920s. The Foundation Pit critiques Joseph Stalin's domestic policies and questions the validity of any regime advocating the belief that the only existence a person can have is being one part of a whole.

Glavlit

Glavlit, the Soviet ministry responsible for censorship. 1980's

Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 - 18 March 1768) was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He wrote the novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, and also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting consumption.

Khomyakov on Humboldt the philosopher/ naturalist

It starts off as a critique of the mir, the "peoplism" debate who is Russia who is Europe The slavophiles were highly edu and intelligent they showed that they understood european phiolosphy really well so that they earned the right to reject it they tie the mir back to Humboldt and hegel, which troubles Dostoevsky. Khomyakov are fascinated by the Europeans t he UM is fasitinate wth the fact that people are fascinated with the way he thinks. Justice will be done in the mir, the mir has its own justice so western system is corrupt eg bros k, it does not work this shows this. The mir is not so great either but this is where we get bros k. So why cant the young guy win the case? The dynamic is crucially important: everyone agrees that's the difference between a mir court cast and the west...in the west they don't all unanimously agree. There are no procedures in the mir, there are no raising hands to make a decision. It happens spontaneously, if you get a lawyer it happens sponntanisley, its just people reasoning with the fullness of their mins and souls which is better in western court in komikovs mind, which leads to lying false decisions and bribery, but in the mir it leads to truth...and it proves that even the strongest man can be brought down by the community. If an innocent person says you hurt me, the kid, we get the goodness of his soul and we know he's innocent b/c he can't finish his speech a speech can cheat anyone out of 600 rubles but the kid is innocent honest soul, he gives up. Khomikov- the old guy was bad...the little guy is good. He sees simplicity and beyond what any european can fathom. The community is wounded b/c the kid is wounded. Fredric douglas: you need to speak in wounded tones, not in white people speech in order to represent the slaves... Khor: Some of Khors ideas are lost In translation which is a sign of complexity, genuineness, conflicted human sprit How do we know the kid is innocent? b/c everyone agrees with him in the community

Short bio: Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad, Russia on May 24, 1940, grew up in St. Petersburg (then it was Leningrad) and wrote poetry as a teen. He was charged with "social parasitism" by the Soviet authorities and was sentenced in 1964 to five years of labor. The sentence was later commuted. Exiled from his country in 1972, Brodsky relocated to the U.S. He won the Nobel Prize in 1987 and served as poet laureate from 1991 to '92. He died on January 28, 1994.

Turgenev's writing style:

Joseph Conrad liked him. Turgenev wrote on themes similar to those found in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but he did not approve of the religious and moral preoccupations that his two great contemporaries brought to their artistic creation. Turgenev was closer in temperament to his friends Gustave Flaubert and Theodor Storm, the North German poet and master of the novella form, who also often dwelt on memories of the past and evoked the beauty of nature

The Foundation Pit (Russian: Котлован, kotlovan)

Platonov finished in 1930 not published in cccl until 1987 b/c censorship: synopsis from soviet lit.net In a dusty little town, a worker named Voshchev is fired from his job at a small machine factory. The management says he just stands around thinking while everyone else is working. Voshchev tries to defend himself, saying that he is trying to work out a plan for life, a way of achieving happiness and spiritual meaning which would raise productivity. The trade union committee is unimpressed, saying that "Happiness will come from materialism, not from meaning." Further, they ask, "What if we all suddenly get carried away thinking--who will be left to act?" Voshchev protests, saying, "If they don't think, people act senselessly!" Having nowhere to go, Voshchev sets off wandering down the road. He comes upon an isolated road keeper's house. The roadkeeper and his wife are loudly arguing in front of their young child, who takes it all in silently. Voshchev rebukes the couple for forgetting what's essential and for not respecting their child, who, after all, will be around long after they are gone. The roadkeeper rudely tells Voshchev to continue on his way. Voshchev resolves to work out the secret of life and return someday to relate it to the child. Voshchev continues down the road. He feels his body going weak without the truth. He needs to know the exact structure of the entire world and what it is he should aim for. Voshchev reaches another town. He witnesses a cripple who has lost both legs harass a blacksmith into giving him some tobacco. The cripple is named Zhachev. Pioneer Days! She'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes. The History, Symbols, and Songs of the Young Pioneers of the USSR! A column of young Pioneer girls goes marching by. Voshchev watches them with a feeling of shame, thinking that they probably know and feel more than he does. Zhachev also watches the girls. Thinking that Zhachev might intend harm to the girls, Voshchev tells him to move off. Zhachev snarls at Voshchev with brutal scorn. It's obvious to Zhachev that Voshchev never fought in a war, and he notes, "A man who's never seen war is like a woman who's never given birth--soft in the head!" Feeling isolated, Voshchev finds a grassy field and lies down to sleep in it. Around midnight, he is awakened by a man with a scythe, who is mowing down the thick grass. The man tells Voshchev that this empty space has now become a building site and stone buildings will soon be erected. On the advice of the man with the scythe, Voshchev finds a workers barracks, full of exhausted, sleeping men. Voshchev lies down among them to sleep. In the morning, the workers size up Voshchev's unimpressive physique. They are uninterested when he says, "My body gets weak without truth." After breakfast, a trade union representative arrives to give the men a tour of the town, so they can see the significance of the work they are to undertake. They will be building the All-Proletarian Home, a single edifice large enough to house the whole of the local proletariat. The representative has brought a brass band for the occasion. Comrade Safronov, the most politically active of the workers, however, angrily tells the trade union representative that they don't need a band or a tour to raise their consciousness. They know about the squalor on their own. He calls the representative a toady. The men go out to the new-mown field and begin to dig a foundation pit, which had been marked out by an engineer, to whose resourceful, attentive mind the world had always yielded; and if matter always yielded to precision and perseverance, this meant that it must be barren and dead. Voshchev works at a much slower pace than the most of the men. Only one weak and emaciated man, Kozlov, works at a slower pace. The other men taunt Kozlov because he masturbates under the covers at night. After six hours of labor, the engineer says that because it is Saturday, it is time to stop. Safronov on the others, however, saying they have enough energy and enthusiasm, insist on working more. That night, while the workers are sleeping, Prushevsky, the work supervisor for the All-Proletarian Home, comes to examine the foundation pit. In a year's time, the entire local proletariat will leave the old town and take up residence in the monumental new home. Despite his knowledge, Prushevsky feels that something is preventing him from understanding anything further about life, about the soul. There is no one who really needs him. He is useful to people, but doesn't make anyone happy. In place of hope, all he has now is endurance. So he decides to kill himself. But first he has to write a letter to his sister. The next morning, digging continues. Pashkin, the chairman of the Regional Trades Union Council, shows up and reprimands the men for working too slowly. Prushevsky arrives up with some more workers. They're all basically unfit--drifters or reeducated former bureaucrats--but there is a shortage of proletarians, so they're set to work. One of the workers, Chiklin sees that nearby there is a gully which is pretty much the right size for them to use as the foundation pit. He makes this suggestion. After all, it would save them some work. Safronov wants to know where Chiklin gets off thinking up things the educated people haven't thought of. All Chiklin can say in defense is, "When you've nothing to live for, you get to thinking inside your head." Prushevsky, who is basically indifferent to things now that he expects to die soon, orders the men to take some soil samples from the gully. Voshchev brings soil samples to Prushevsky. He asks the engineer if he knows what nature's all about, how the world was constructed. Prushevsky says he was taught only about the dead bits of this and that, never about the inside of anything or about things as a whole. Free both of hope and of any desire for satisfaction, Prushevsky spends longer than usual examining the soil samples. "All he wanted was to busy himself with objects and structures, so that they, rather than friendship and personal attachments, would fill his mind and his empty heart." At the time of the Revolution, dogs howled day and night all over RussiaZhachev hobbles over to Pashkin's house to collect his regular ration. He crudely abuses Pashkin and Pashkin's wife the whole time. Pashkin's wife is irritated but doesn't say anything, remembering that Zhachev once denounced Pashkin to the Regional Party Committee. Pashkin was cleared, but the investigation dragged on for months, and a big to-do was made over Pashkin's name and patronymic--"Leon Ilych" ("Just whose side is he on?" some asked.) Zhachev goes off to the workers' barracks and eats some kasha with the men, mainly to demonstrate his equality with the others. Safronov looks at the bleak landscape and wonders, "why do the fields all look so dreary? Does the world have nothing inside but sorrow?" Voshchev complains that all they do is dig and sleep. He thinks he would be better off begging around the collective farms. He says, "Without truth I feel ashamed to be alive." Safronov tries to sympathize with Voshchev, but, he ponders, "Was it not the case that the truth was simply a class enemy? Nowadays, after all, the class enemy was quite capable of sidling its way into your imagination and even your dreams." Prushevsky, frightened and sad at home, comes to the barracks and sleeps with the workers. In the morning, Kozlov is shocked to see that Prushevsky--a man from the leadership--is sleeping with the common workers. Kozlov sees this as a violation of the social order and threatens to complain. Dutch Tiles She'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes. The History of Dutch Tiles and How to Make Them In talking with Chiklin, Prushevsky recalls a girl he saw many years ago in the pre-Revolutionary days. He can't recall what she looked like, but remembers taking a liking to her as she passed him by, never stopping. Prushevsky wishes he could see this girl again. Chiklin says the girl was probably the daughter of the Dutch-tile factory boss. Chiklin had had his own run-in with this girl when he was working at the factory. One day, she came up to him and kissed him. Thinking her brazen, Chiklin did not respond and just kept walking past her. Prushevsky and Chiklin suppose that by now this girl has grown old and blotchy. Kozlov decides to go to the Social Security office to get himself an invalid's pension. That way, he will have more free time to keep an eye on everything so as to keep society safe from harm and make sure there aren't any petty-bourgeois uprisings. Safronov brands Kozlov a "parasite...an unprincipled opportunist bent on abandoning the working masses." Kozlov shoots back that Safronov is a wrecker who tried to undermine collectivization by once inciting a poor peasant to slaughter and eat a cock. Safronov ignores this and walks away. "He didn't much like it when people denounced him." Work on the foundation pit continues. Worn out by the heavy labor, Voshchev is more resigned to his situation. "He contented himself with going out on his days off and collecting all kinds of unfortunate little scraps of nature as documentary proof that the world had been created without a plan, as evidence of the melancholia in every living breath." He tells Safronov that he wants truth so as to increase the productivity of labor. Safronov admonishes him that what the proletariat really lives for is enthusiasm for labor. Chiklin goes to the old Dutch-tile factory, which is abandoned and falling apart. In a remote part of the factory he finds the boss's daughter, who had kissed him so many years ago. She is now a toothless old hag on the brink of death. She is being tended to by her young daughter, named Nastya. The woman (Julia) tells Nastya never to reveal her bourgeois origins. Nastya falls asleep. Chiklin creeps up and kisses Julia, who dies. Chiklin brings Nastya to live in the barracks. He then brings Prushevsky to the Dutch-tile factory and shows him the dead Julia. Prushevsky is unmoved. In fact, he doesn't even recognize the woman as the young girl he saw long ago. But, he notes, "I never recognized people I loved once I'd got intimate with them--I just yearned for them from a distance." Chiklin respectfully covers the doorway to the old woman's room with bricks and chunks of rock. "The dead are people, too", he says. That evening, the men turn their attention to Nastya who is now in their midst. Zhachev secretly decides that once the girl and other children are grown up a bit, he will kill all the local adults--most of whom are egoists and future bloodsuckers. Safronov questions Nastya about her parents. But Nastya, remembering her mother's warning, says only that when there were bourgeoisie she wasn't born because she didn't want to be; but as soon as Lenin came along, she was happy to be born. Safronov happily concludes, "If kids can forget their own mothers but still have a sense of comrade Lenin, then Soviet power really is here to stay!" Nastya falls asleep. All the men decide to start working a hour earlier tomorrow on the foundation pit, so that the new home will sooner become a reality and "underage personnel" such as Nastya can be protected. Zhachev approves of the idea, telling the workers, "You're going to wind up stiffs whatever you do...so why not love something small and living and flog yourself to death with labor? Do something decent for once!" It's our coffins that keep us alive--they're all we've got left.While digging in the gully, the workers unearth 100 empty coffins. Chiklin gives two to Nastya--one for a bed and the other to keep her toys and whatnot in. The next day, a peasant named Yelisey shows up demanding that the coffins be returned to his village. They were all properly measured and premade for the people in his village, including the children. "It's our coffins that keep us alive--they're all we've got left", he says. The 98 remaining coffins are tied together in one long line and Yelisey hauls them off by himself. Some time later, Voshchev sets off down the road, following the trail left by the coffins. Kozlov shows up at the construction site, wearing a three-piece suit and arriving in a car driven by Pashkin. Since leaving the barracks and getting his grade-one pension, Kozlov has become a known and respected active force in society. Each morning, he memorizes little formulae, slogans, lines of poetry, quotes from official documents, etc. Then he goes out and about, uttering these phases in public places and thereby inciting respect and terror. Enigmatically criticizing a food cooperative, he suddenly found himself appointed Chairman of the cooperative's Trade Union Council. Comrade, Come Join Us on the Kolkhoz! She'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes. Collectivization: What Happened, the Impact, and the Ukrainian Famine At the foundation pit, Pashkin informs the workers that the peasants in the nearby village are longing for a collective farm. It is decided to send Safronov and Kozlov to the village to keep the blaze of class struggle burning hot. The foundation pit is complete. All that remains is to fill it in with rubble. Pashkin, however, decides that it's not big enough, since socialist women will soon be brimming with freshness and the entire surface of the earth will soon be swarming with infant persons. The town boss authorizes making the pit four times bigger. On his own initiative, Pashkin decides to make it six times bigger. Voshchev and a sub-kulak return from the village with the news that Safronov and Kozlov died in a hut. They take Nastya's two coffins to bury them in. Nastya is angry and doesn't understand why the dead get to have the coffins. Chiklin explains, "Once people die, they get to be special." Chiklin and Voshchev take the coffins to the village, where everything is steeped in the decrepitude of poverty. In the village, the local activist (a bungling and incompetent but nonetheless enthusiastic organizer) tells Chiklin to go to the village Soviet and stand guard over Kozlov and Safronov's corpses, to prevent them from being defiled by a kulak. When he gets to the village soviet, Chiklin sees that his comrades died of ghastly wounds. In the morning, the Yelisey and a yellow-eyed peasant come to wash the bodies. Chiklin asks who killed his comrades. The peasants say they don't know. Not satisfied with this answer, Chiklin punches the yellow-eyed peasant. The peasant willingly takes the beating, hoping to receive some serious injury and so win entitlement to a poor peasant's right to life. Chiklin winds up killing the peasant. Another peasant mysteriously turns up dead. The village activist identifies the new corpse as the peasant element responsible for the deadly wrecking of Kozlov and Safronov. The activist is confident he would have unmasked this peasant in about thirty minutes anyway. The activist is glad that there are two dead peasants, saying, "The Center would never have believed me if I said there was one murderer. But two's another matter altogether--that's an entire kulak class and organization." After the dead are buried, Chiklin receives a letter from Prushevsky. He informs Chiklin that Nastya has started attending nursery school. Nastya herself traced out this message: LIQUIDATE THE KULAKS AS A CLASS. LONG LIVE LENIN, KOZLOV AND SAFRONOV GREETINGS TO THE COLLECTIVE FARM, BUT NOT THE KULAKS. The next morning, the activist gathers together the fifty or so rag-tag members of the collective farm. He plans to march them, in star formation, through neighboring villages, where people are still clinging to their private holdings. The weather is dank and windy, and the activist grumbles, "So much for the organization of nature." The activist had received no directives the previous evening, so he is terrified both of overlooking something and of being overzealous. He had so far collectivized only the village horses, although he agonized over the solitary cows, sheep, etc., since in the hands of a rampant kulak, even a goat could be a level of capitalism. After the collective farmers set off on their parade, the collectivized horses--on their own initiative and with no human involvement--set off to a ravine to drink and wash themselves. Then they march back into the village and gather up mouthfuls of food. Together they march back into the collective farm yard, drop all the food into a common pile, and only then begin to eat. Voshchev and Chiklin enter a hut and find a feeble old man lying motionless on a bench. He claims that his soul has left him ever since his horse was collectivized. In a second hut they find a man lying in a coffin. For several weeks now he has been trying to die, and now, in front of Voshchev and Chiklin, he finally succeeds, and his body goes cold. Counterrevolutionary Letter! Ouch!. The Death of the Hard Sign and Other Adventures in Russian Orthographics Later, Voshchev and Chiklin attend a literacy lesson for women and girls, taught by the activist. Strangely, he has the women write all "good", socialist words with a hard sign (tvordii znak) at the end (in violation of the orthographic reform promulgated by the Bolsheviks--ed.). As the activist sees it, "We can't do without the hard sign--it makes a slogan tough and precise. It's the soft sign that should be abolished." The activist wants a light for his pipe. Chiklin offers to get it for him. Chiklin takes the pipe and goes to the dilapidated church. There he finds the former priest, sitting on the pulpit smoking. The priest says, however, that he has renounced his soul and is doing probation before he can join the Atheist Club. He spends his days in the church selling candles and making a list of anyone who crosses themselves or bows down before the heavenly powers. The list is then handed over to the activist. Just on principle, Chiklin punches the priest. The priest collapses to the floor and starts praying and crossing himself. The activist has Chiklin and Voshchev start making a raft. As they work, the activist gathers all the organized and unorganized peasants together. He announces that the kulaks are about to be liquidated as a class, to wit, they are to be put on the raft and sent off down the river. The activist draws up a list of those to be liquidated, and he writes a resolution on the matter. He is unable to use commas, since there had been none in the original directive. The middle-peasant women weep and wail. An old ploughman named Ivan Semyonovich Krestinin kisses the saplings in his orchard, then rips them out by the roots, saying, "These trees are my own flesh, and my flesh must suffer now--it doesn't want to be taken prisoner and collectivized." Expecting the collectivization, many peasants stopped feeding their horses long ago. One such horse stands in her stall, almost--but not quite--dead on her feet. Some dogs come in and start gnawing on her feet. Pain keeps her alive, as does hunger when someone waves hay in front of her nostrils. All other livestock animals were slaughtered and eaten so as not to be collectivized. Some of the peasants had become bloated from all this meat eating and were lumbering around like sheds. Others couldn't stop vomiting. The night is so foul that Chiklin has to stop working on the raft. Voshchev stops, too, grown weak from lack of ideology. The activist calls the kulaks together and gives them a last chance to say their farewells. The peasants emotionally hug and kiss everyone--most of them total strangers--as if they were dearest friends and closest relatives. One of them remarks, "We lived like swine, but we're dying in good conscience." Announcing that they are ready, the peasants say, "We can't feel anything--all that's left inside us is dust." Voshchev happily responds, "Now you're like me--I'm nothing, too." Everyone falls asleep. When Chiklin awakens, he sees that Prushevsky has arrived, sent by Pashkin as a cadre of the cultural revolution. Along with him have come Zhachev and Nastya. Yelisey takes Chiklin and Nastya to see the collective farm's only hired farm laborer (proletarian)--a blacksmith's hammerer, who, it turns out, is in fact a bear. The bear is apparently adept at sniffing out kulaks. Chiklin, Nastya, and the bear set out in a snowstorm to find kulaks. The bear finds a family of them in a hut--a man, a woman, and little boy, who is sitting on a potty. The bear growls and Chiklin orders the kulaks out. Curious, the bear sits down on the potty to try it out, but feels uncomfortable. Chiklin, Nastya, and the bear continue on and find another kulak. They toss him out of his hut, liquidating him. The kulak shouts back, "It's me today, but it'll be you tomorrow. And that's how it'll be--the only person who'll ever reach Socialism is that leader of yours!" Chiklin and the bear liquidate various other kulaks then return to the collective farm. Prushevsky has completed the raft. The kulaks are loaded onto the raft and sent floating down the river. The activist sets up a loudspeaker in the yard and plays music. The peasants from the collective farm--as well as peasants from nearby villages who were ordered to attend--begin dancing. Even the collectivized horses kick up their heels in the fun. In the merriment, one peasant calls the USSR a saucy, canny wench. Zhachev whacks the peasant and tells him, "Don't you dare think anything that comes into your head. The now-frightened peasant responds, "I'll never think anything again, comrade cripple." The music stops, and a voice over the loudspeaker announces, "You must all lay in stocks of willow bark!" The activist takes note of this and prepares for the upcoming willow bark campaign. The radio breaks down. The peasants, however, keep singing on their own. To put an end to the party, Zhachev resorts to peasant-tipping, knocking them over one-by-one and in groups. Voshchev walks around the village gathering up all sorts of wretched little cast-off objects. He brings them to the activist so he can catalog them--all the forgotten bits and pieces that had no name or identity, so Socialism could avenge them. These were the material remains of the lost people who, like Voshchev, had lived without truth and who had perished before the final victory. Making lists of these items, Voshchev hoped, would avenge those lost, dead people through the organization of eternal human meaning. Visit Lenin and his Masoleum Zzzzzz.... The Lenin Masoleum - Photos, Documents, Articles and a Virtual Tour of the Masoleum Chiklin feels sorry for these nameless dead and asks Prushevsky if the success of higher science will be able to resurrect people back after they've decomposed. Prushevsky says, "No", but Zhachev immediately calls him a liar, saying that "Marxism can do everything" and noting that Lenin, entombed in Red Square, is merely waiting for science to come and resurrect him. For some reason, the bear wakes up in the middle of the night begins hammering away and roaring as if in song. Because of this, no on can get any sleep. In the morning, the bear is still hammering away. Everyone gathers to watch him work. Working in a frenzy, he is pounding way too hard. The peasants tell him to ease up, otherwise the metal will be too brittle and break easily. The bear merely roars angrily, and the peasants back off fearfully. Chiklin is helping the bear, but he doesn't know what he's doing either. Worried about the great waste of iron, Yelisey and the other peasants finally overcome their hesitation and take over the work, doing it the right way. Even Voshchev joins in, forgetting himself in the patience of labor. The only one who stays aloof from the common labor is Prushevsky. He chooses a definite date and time for his death, for there is nothing that could overcome the impoverishment of his soul. An eager young woman, hungry for knowledge of the world, comes up to Prushevsky and asks if he has come to teach them the cultural revolution. He sighs, agrees, and goes off with her. The members of the collective farm burn up all the coal and use all the iron in making useful objects. The bear collapses and falls asleep. Voshchev, now that he has stopped working, begins thinking again. Chiklin angrily tosses Voshchev down on the ground next to the bear, telling him to lie down and shut up. He says, "The bear just lies there and breathes, so why can't you? The proletariat gets on with life, but you're too scared. You bastard!" The activist receives a dispatch from Provincial Headquarters, warning that the middle peasants' eagerness to join the collective might be an indication of some secret plot being hatched by sub-kulak forces to wash away the leadership. The directive points to the activist at the General Line Collective Farm, who, it says, has fallen into the leftist quagmire of rightist opportunism. It says the collective activist was aspiring to a higher form beyond the collective and the commune. Such an activist, the provincial leaders say, is undoubtedly a wrecker and an objective enemy of the proletariat. The activist weeps. Nastya wakes up, feeling cold and damp and asking for her mother. The world around her would have to become immeasurably kinder and gentler for her to have any chance of staying alive. Chiklin puts his coat, Zhachev's coat, and the activist's coat over Nastya to keep her warm. The activist feels upset, lonely, and abandoned by the masses, so he snatches his coat away from Nastya. Reading the directive from Provincial Headquarters, Zhachev suggests they get an iron bar and deal with the activist. Chiklin objects, saying he doesn't hit people with lumps of metal--that way he wouldn't get to feel justice. Instead, he wallops the activist in the chest with his sledgehammer fist. The activist crumbles to the floor. Outside, the collective farm folk furiously sweep away all the snow as a hygienic precaution. Doubtful elements who had been confined in storerooms and various other places, take advantage of the activist's absence and sneak out to return to their daily lives. A whining sound is heard. It is the bear. As Voshchev explains, all the bear is fit for is work. The moment he takes a rest he starts thinking and then he gets all down in the mouth. Voshchev intends to add the bear to his scrap collection. Voshchev examines the activist and determines that he is dead. The collective farmers aren't upset by this (after all, the activist was a reptile) but they aren't pleased either, since he was the only one who knew the law and took care of them. Voshchev realizes that the activist had functioned in a predatory manner, monopolizing the whole of universal truth in himself. Voshchev calls the activist vermin and shouts out, "So that's why I never knew the meaning of anything! It wasn't just me you sucked dry, you arid soul, it was the whole of our class!" Voshchev announces that from now on he will take care of the collective farmers, and they are agreeable to the idea. Voshchev orders the peasants to send the activist's body down the river with the kulaks. Nastya, who has fallen ill, keeps asking for her mother. Chiklin says it's time to go back to the town. Prushevsky wants to stay, however, because he hasn't finished teaching the village youth. In order to make the best possible time, Chiklin carries Zhachev and Yelisey carries Nastya. They arrive in town. The foundation pit is fully covered with snow, and the barracks is dark and empty. Chiklin tries to make a fire to keep Nastya warm. Nastya keeps saying, "Bring me my mommy's bones." She also asks why she always feels her mind. Chiklin suggests that it is because she's never seen anything good. Suddenly, Nastya kisses Chiklin, just as her mother had done so many years ago. The girl then falls asleep. The next morning, it is freezing cold. Nastya is dead. Chiklin is overcome with an urge to dig. He goes to the foundation pit and digs feverishly in the ground, which is frozen solid. He digs and digs because he wants to forget his mind and to forget the fact that Nastya is dead. Voshchev unexpectedly shows up with the whole collective farm, including the collectivized horses. Voshchev has come to give Nastya a sack of his collected scrap, each item an eternal reminder of someone who was now forgotten. When he sees that Nastya is dead, he is bewildered. He doesn't understand how Communism could ever come to exist if it didn't appear first of all in a child's feelings and conviction. Zhachev wants to know why Voshchev brought along the whole collective farm. Voshchev says the peasants want to enroll as proletariat. Chiklin agrees to the idea. Now, he says, they will have to dig the foundation pit wider and deeper because they'll have to build a house big enough for anyone who comes along, workers or peasants. Chiklin resumes digging in the foundation pit, and the peasants all join in. They dig with a furious zeal for life, as though they were seeking eternal salvation in the abyss of the foundation pit. Even the horses joined in. The only one who doesn't join in the work is Zhachev. "I don't believe in anything any more," he explains. "I'm a freak of Imperialism....But Communism's something for the kids. That's why I loved Nastya." As his final act, Zhachev plans to go off and kill comrade Pashkin. Chiklin spends 15 hours digging a grave deep enough for Nastya so that neither worms nor roots nor the noise of life from earth's surface would ever disturb her. It is night as he lays her in her grave. Everyone is asleep except for the bear. Chiklin allows the bear to touch Nastya for one last time.

Postmodernism:

Postmodernists according to Linda Hutcheon—Poetics of post-modernism "What postmodernism does, as its very name suggests, is confront and contest any modernist discarding or recuperating of the past in the name of the future. It suggests no search for transcendent timeless meaning, but rather a re-evaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present." Postmodernism is "the contradictions of modernism in an explicitly political light." (24) o The past is not pushed to the side, but rather "incorporated and modified, given new and different life and meaning." (24) · Ironic parody in architecture (25) · Postmodernism does not negate modernism, but "what it does do is interpret it freely; it 'critically reviews it for its glories and its errors.'" (30) · (34) Parody as a link between art and world. · (35) "Postmodernist parody, be it in architecture, literature, painting, film, or music, uses its historical memory, its aesthetic introversion, to signal that this kind of self-reflexive discourse is always inextricably bound to social discourse." · Historiographic metafiction—reworking of history using both historical events and fiction. · Postmodernism mainly challenges institutions—ranging from media to the university to museums to theatres. Post modernism: (looking back at modernism but putting things in the light of the presnt day) crisis of audience, crisis of identity eg Pushkinsky Dom, so focus on authors of the past he's consciously writing to the reader. Confront and contest modernists. Contradictions Also challenges institutions but modernism does too. Wanted to create something that the reader could actually live vs modernism zakliete smekom who cares if anyone gets it its "art" The process of art not the actual outcome (in modernism) Post modernism = how its received and anylaizing the past. Its more user friendly (they wanted it to be) Errofeev= post modernism ( works that play with time) Errofeev: travel log type story, scientific graphs for drinks, all told from perspective of a drunk person, it's a parody works: Pelevin, Medea and her sisters Ulitskaya, Petrushekskaya, errofeev,

Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands

Sketches from a Hunter's Album (1852) Turgenev: While in a carriage the narrator comes across a funeral procession and goes to Yudin village to get a new axle when theirs breaks. There he meets Kasyan, a fifty-year-old dwarf who lives in the village and belongs to some unnamed religious sect. He takes them to get a new axle and the narrator notices how at one he seems with his environment and incredibly generous. Kasyan states his hatred of established society through his glorification of the world of folklore.

Peasant paradox or the purity paradox:

Someone who does not realize they are innocent is a true innocent A peasant is a true peasant if they lack the words to explain how they are different from you The true peasant is the one who cant explain what it is to be a peasant. Being articulate makes you not a peasant. So if you can explain all about peasants than you are not one. The truth is the person who cant communicate Khomikov, thinks that he can explain the peasents.... Khomikov wants to tell us, what he cant tell us you cant explain the soul of the Russian peasent. Probelmeatic b/c the peasent cant articulate what it is to be a peasent. One of the most important things not to miss: the soul of the peasant is a different way of thinking, that's so radically different b/c they think w/out putting things to words so if you explain it in rational language you have already betweyed it b/c what a peasent does is insticturive and intiuive collective, its radicall thought We want to get inot the peaent wold of thoguth....

Сюжет vs Fabula

Soozhet is whats in the book/ plot as give in to you by narrator. Fabula is the chronological order of the book e.g. hero of our time is a good example. Maxzim M is the actually "end" of the book. So, its taman, pricness mary, fatalist, bela Mm the order of the diary and the diary comes first.

Фабула / Story line

a. E.g. Types of story lines we encounter: pre-history, oral tales shared between generations, myths, legends, storytelling in myths and legends to explain the seeming chaos of natural forces and the unexplained. Narratives can involve communicating political intentions surreptitiously or not (Russian literature has a wealth of this), and can be found in all genres e.g. mystery, satire, comedy, drama, science fiction etc. b. Fabula is everywhere and it is dynamic. A story is an example of a snapshot in time. Ha Preemera, устные рассказы ( oral tales), греческий миф ( greek myth) and its dyamic or динамический

Tristram Shandy

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (or Tristram Shandy) is a humorous novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next seven years (vols. 3 and 4, 1761; vols. 5 and 6, 1762; vols. 7 and 8, 1765; vol. 9, 1767). It purports to be a biography of the eponymous character. Its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices. Sterne had read widely, which is reflected in Tristram Shandy. Many of his similes, for instance, are reminiscent of the works of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century,[1] and the novel as a whole, with its focus on the problems of language, has constant regard to John Locke's theories in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.[2] Arthur Schopenhauer cited Tristram Shandy as one of the greatest novels ever written.

Postmodernist work, Ulitskaya Medea and her Children

The members of a raucous extended Russian family trade witticisms, fall in and out of love with the wrong people and try—with mixed success—to make important decisions in this wry second novel by the author of The Funeral Party. At the center is the elderly Medea Mendez, the matriarch and "last remaining pure-blooded Greek" of a Crimean family now scattered across the former Soviet Union. While childless herself, in the summer months Medea plays host to her many nieces and nephews, each of them inevitably in the midst of a crisis. Medea's niece Masha discovers the pleasure of adulterous love (permissible because she has an open marriage), but neither sex nor her gifts as a poet can save her from despair. Of course, it doesn't help that she's competing with her own sister for the affections of her summer fling, a circus acrobat turned yoga instructor. Masha's husband, Alik, a talented biochemist, must decide whether to leave his motherland for a lucrative job in America. Ulitskaya also tells the story of Medea's own marriage to a Jewish ex-revolutionary who began his proposal with "you really aren't my type at all." There are plenty of vignettes of Soviet and post-Soviet life, from fixed gymnastics competitions to gossip about who's got what connection and who's father-in-law is a "top bastard in the Party." Ulitskaya's observations are quite funny, though her relentlessly sardonic tone tends to stifle the characters. Still, this colorful, noisy panorama of Russian life is entertaining, and Ulitskaya ties the book's loose ends together slyly

Fathers and Sons, brief:

The work is an investigation of the growing divide between the liberals of the 1830s-40s and the growing nihilist movement. Both the nihilists and the liberals sought social change in Russia, but disagreed on how to reach it. These are then contrasted with the Slavophiles, who sought to correct Russia by returning to its pure roots. This work is the first modern novel in Russian literature and it also introduced a dual character study where Arkady and Bazarov (the nihilist sons) lose their beliefs to emotion. This theme of character duality and psychological insight exerted a huge influence on writers such as Dostoevsky. This was also one of the first Russian novels to gain prominence in the Western world.

Singers:

Turgenev, hunters sketches: The narrator comes across a "terrible village" and goes to a tavern set at the end of a ravine. In the tavern he finds that some locals are having a singing contest. The one, Yakov, has the gift of technical prowess. The other, Yasha, has natural talent. Yakov goes first and the group believes he's won due to the skill he displays but when Yasha sings, he sings beautifully with the "collective voice of the Russian identity," leading everyone to cry with no discussion of his skill afterword. Yakov stammers that he won and they are about to drink, but the narrator is disturbed by this since he found the scene so beautiful amongst the horrible surroundings, and he goes outside to sleep. He leaves while hearing peasant boys calling to each other in the night.

significance of Sportsmens sketchs

Turgenev. was said to have influenced Tsar Alexander II to liberate the serfs.

Bezhin Lea:

Turgenev/ hunters sketchs: (Bezhin Meadow) The narrator gets lost in the woods and comes across a clearing, where he meets up with five peasant boys near a fire who are guarding the horses. The narrator pretends to be asleep and the boys forget he is there and start talking about fairies and talking animals, stories that they believe to be true. The beauty of the story is typically found in the innocence of the young boys. Serfdom here is hidden in the background, never truly mentioned or argued against as in the other stories.

Melkii bes

c.f poor folk/ b/c Peredonov is afraid of losing Varavara also the double/ Dost. The hero, Peredonov, is a nasty little man, an abusive schoolteacher whose ambition is to become inspector of schools, through the connections of his fiancee Varvara. Varvara, terrified of Peredonov dumping her, has been in league with the old spinster Grushina, who fabricates her connections, forging letters from a princess in St. Petersburg to Peredonov. Varvara keeps up the charade with increasingly unbelievable antics until Peredonov marries her, by which point he is quite paranoid, and partly with reason, since most of the people around him really do loathe him and gossip about his peccadilloes. By the end, he has become completely crazy, unwilling to believe what everyone else knows-that the letters are fakes-and instead chasing after fabricated plots, setting fire to ballrooms, and eventually turning on his dense friend Volodin and slitting his throat, spurred on by the "petty demon" of the title, which taunts him and eggs him on.

Most basic Hegelian idea

doctrine of progress= the idea that history keeps improving and the world keeps getting belter and better....so the Slavophiles are looking for an alternate forward. The alternate forward negates hegel

facts about Turgenev (1818-1883)

his father died when he was 16 and he had an abusive mother which affected him. He was known for his intelligence, timidness and restraint. His brain weighed over two kilograms. While studying abroad he became a strong believer in Westernization instead of a Slavophile, thinking that Russia would do good to imitate the methods of Europe in order to erase its problems. He was looked at in favor for his early writings by the critic Belinsky. Later in his life he did not reside much in Russia and died in Paris.

Brodsky and The state of exile for the writer

i. Exile for the writer is like going home in several ways, because he gets closer to the seat of the ideals, which initially inspired him. Exile is not what it used to be, as in " leaving civilized Rome for savage Sarmatia" (Brodsky 101). ii. Exile is a transition from a political and economic backwater to an industrially advanced society. For the exile, taking this route is akin to going home. iii. He suggests that if the exiled writer had a genre it would be a "tragicomedy", due to his "appreciation of the social and material advantages of democracy far more intensely than its natives" as a result of his " previous incarnation". iv. The democracy in which he has arrived provides him with physical safety but renders him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take. v. He compares the exiled writer to a Gastarbeiter or a "guest worker" and political refugee who is "running away from the worse toward the better" (Brodsky 101). Later he adds that the "plight of the exiled writer " is actually much worse than that of a Gastarbeiter, because the writer cannot be left to anonymity and within him, innately, is a "quest for significance". vi. Exile teaches humility, so in that sense it is "good" and, he postulates, " is the ultimate lesson in "that virtue" (Brodsky 102). vii. Exile gives the writer the "longest possible perspective" and is somewhat lost in the crowds. He borrows from Keats, who explains " To be lost in mankind, in the crowd- crowd?- among billions; to become the needle in that proverbial haystack-but a needle someone is searching for- that's what exile is all about". viii. It is a "metaphysical condition" and ignoring or dodging it would be cheating yourself out of the meaning (emphasis added) that has happened to you which will place you eternally at the "receiving end of things" to " ossify into an uncomprehending victim" (Brodsky 103). ix. His main consideration is " the folks back home" however; he has a desire to "rule the roost in the malicious village of his fellow émigrés". His ego keeps growing in "diameter" (he uses a hot air balloon as a metaphor) because it is "unchecked by anyone" let alone his kin, for he is "beyond suspicion". However Brodsky cautions against becoming too "inflated" because winds for a " balloon" are unpredictable and thus, can become the "playthings" of political movements. Still, in the émigré mind the destination is always " homeward bound" (Brodsky 103). x. His last point on the writer in exile is that retrospection plays an excessive role in his existence, "dimming the future" and "overshadowing reality" (Brodsky 104). xi. He cautions the exile against to much self estrangement or wearing a halo, because "you" are not the only émigré writing out there due to an explosion in population and at any time " there are more people who haven't heard of you" then have. xii. With regard to the current interests in the literature of exiles Brodsky says that it is mostly focused on tyrannies, which may offer some sort of insurance for future readers. Still Brodsky does not advocate the continuation of tyrannies in order to ensure literary success (Brodsky105). xiii. Comparing the exiled writer to Goethes Faust, both cling to their " fate" or unfair "moment" not for beholding it, but for postponement of the next one. xiv. An exile never wants to be appear influenced by his contemporaries, and his writing style slows down in stylistic evolution. So a writer is more conservative. Exile gives fewer irritants than the motherland does. xv. On leaving a legacy, he advises that on the bookshelf your place will be occupied not by you, but by your book, and " it is better if they find your book good and your life foul. than the other way around" (Brodsky 107). xvi. Brodsky suggest that exile is " the very moment of departure, of expulsion; what follows is both too comfortable and too autonomous to be called by this name, which so strongly suggests a comprehensibly grief". The is no common denominator among émigré writers yet they are united by the same "book like" fate as lying on a table in a dusty library or in the readers hands (Brodsky 107). xvii. The condition of exile, it hugely accelerates ones own professional drift or flight into isolation, into an "absolute perspective: into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and ones language, with nobody or nothing in-between. xviii. The function of literature is to "save the next man, or new arrival, from falling into an old trap, or to help him realize, should he fall into that trap anyway , that he has been hit with a tautology" ( a phrase or expression in which the same thing is said twice in different words). (Brodsky 108). xix. Knowing the meaning of life's terms, of what is happening to you, is liberating. Exile is famous for its pain, yet it is also know for its pain dulling infinity, forgetfulness, detachment and indifference: all of which we have no yardstick to measure with except ourselves. xx. An exiles function is tell of the oppression they have endured and to make life easier for the next man. The émigré condition should serve as a warning to any thinking man toying with the idea of an ideal society. xxi. On freedom Brodsky ends the conversion with his view on freedom: " a free man when he fails blames no-one", and " the idea that a freed man is not a free man, that liberation is just the means of attaining freedom, and is not synonymous with it" (Brodsky 109). "Geography blended with time equals destiny".

Soozhet

is whats in the book/ plot as give in to you by narrator. - Сюжет- Plot, Literary theory; Culler p.85 : Aristotle states that plot is the most basic feature of the narrative, and that good stories must have a beginning, middle, and end and that they give pleasure b/c of the rhythm of their ordering. Plot is the most important element, in Aristotle's view. Elements of a plot according to Culler: I. A plot requires transformation. a. E.g. there must be an initial situation, a change involving some sort of reversal, and a resolution that marks the change as significant. b. This change may involve a move from one relationship between characters, to its opposite or from a fear of prediction to its realization or its inversion from a problem to a solution or from a false accusation/ misrepresentation to rectification. c. A mere sequence of events does not make a story. There must be an end relating back to the beginning. d. Some theorists suggest that the end is the result of the desire or what happened to it, in the events that the story narrates. e. Plots can be summarized and readers can notice that two works are versions of the same story, as we did with Пиковая Дама, Старука, и Бедная Лиза. f. The theory of narrative suggests that the existence of a level of structure or plot is independent of any particular language or representational medium. g. Unlike poetry, plot is not lost in translation. E.g. a silent film can have the same plot as a short story.

Chronotope

originally from the theater, (time and space) its time.... relating to time.... Time, far away peasants idlly....different time.... no time, slow time etc Whereas in a utopia we know all the rules they are heavily enforced there is a beginning and an end

Poshlust

re Chichikov, rotundness, wheels tires, worm like traveling satan salesman stupidity = poshlust Poshlost: has been defined as "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity",[2] while Svetlana Boym[3] defines it briefly as "obscenity and bad taste". Boym goes on to describe it at more length:[4] Poshlost' is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality. The war against poshlost' was a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia from the 1860s to 1960s. Early examinations of poshlost in literature are in the work of Nikolai Gogol. Gogol wrote (of Pushkin), He used to say of me that no other writer before me possessed the gift to expose so brightly life's poshlust, to depict so powerfully the poshlust of a poshlusty man [poshlost' poshlovo cheloveka] in such a way that everybody's eyes would be opened wide to all the petty trivia that often escape our attention." — "The Third Letter à Propos Dead Souls", 1843, quoted and translated by Davydov, 1995. Brackets in original. See below for his transliteration "poshlust". In his novels, Turgenev "tried to develop a heroic figure who could, with the verve and abandon of a Don Quixote, grapple with the problems of Russian society, who could once and for all overcome 'poshlost', the complacent mediocrity and moral degeneration of his environment".[5] Dostoyevsky applied the word to the Devil; Solzhenitsyn, to Western-influenced young people.[4] POSHLUST vladimir Nabokov made it more widely known in his book on Gogol, where he romanized it as "poshlust" (punningly: "posh" + "lust"). Poshlust, Nabokov explained, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. A list of literary characters personifying poshlust will include... Polonius and the royal pair in Hamlet, Rodolphe and Homais from Madame Bovary, Laevsky in Chekhov's 'The Duel', Joyce's Marion [Molly] Bloom, young Bloch in Search of Lost Time, Maupassant's 'Bel Ami', Anna Karenina's husband, and Berg in War and Peace".[7] Nabokov 1973 also listed -corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.-

The fourth wall

re Revisor/ Gogol/ the government inspector: The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this "wall", the convention assumes, the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th century onwards, the rise of illusionism in staging practices, which culminated in the realism and naturalism of the theatre of the 19th century, led to the development of the fourth wall concept. "Breaking the fourth wall" is any instance in which this performance convention, having been adopted more generally in the drama, is violated. This can be done through either directly referencing the audience or the work they are in, or referencing their fictionality. The temporary suspension of the convention in this way draws attention to its use in the rest of the performance. This act of drawing attention to a play's performance conventions is metatheatrical. A similar effect of metareference is achieved when the performance convention of avoiding direct contact with the camera, generally used by actors in a television drama or film, is temporarily suspended. The phrase "breaking the fourth wall" is used to describe such effects in those media. Breaking the fourth wall is also possible in other media, such as video games and books.

Khor and Kalinych: from notes

realist short story. Turgenev. an "anti-sketch" if we compare it to the sketches, c.f. organ grinders and petersburg corner by Grigorovich and Nekrasov. the narrator plays a much more important role here, than the one in the sketchs. Khor is an entrepreneur he chooses not to buy himself off which would save him money- agency. Khor asks, "are things like here? Turgenev making a comment on the slavophiles here. shows that Khor is smart enough to consider a world beyond his although he has never traveled. smart enough to conceive of the idea etc. • Khor was like Peter the great ( khor is like Peter) peasants and peter are supposed to be the exact opposite, but here they are similar.

Herzen and Dostoevksy views:

recall that Herzen looked to russia for salvation and rejected europeanism herzen looks critcailly at the bourgeoius like Dostoevksy does who claims that all that is to them are" things" whats on the outside, how they look etc

There Once Lived a Woman who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, 2009 Petrushevksaya:

the stories often contain mystical or allegorical elements which are used to illuminate bleak Soviet and post-Soviet living conditions. "Petrushevskaya's stories could easily be read as bleak grotesques, populated by envious neighbors, selfish adolescents, and parents who overcompensate with exaggerated love. But ultimately, Petrushevskaya's skillful juxtapositions yield glints of light. Resilience and ingenuity thread through the hardship, whether in the form of forgiveness or love. Such traces of humanity are starker—and brighter—because of the darkness that surrounds them.

Modernism:

~1900-1925 then socials realism b/c of the thaw. Artistic synthesisism, forceful expression of individuality, experimenting with what others have not done before. Experimentation. ( did not want to get political which is in of itself revolutionary ) Modernists wanted to create a better world out of the rubble of WWI, but they never consulted the people who would be living in them, and thus they created uncomfortable places to live Much focus on the senses according to Clowes' ( re modernism) e.g. sounds noises drums ect so you get overwhelmed ( the reader ) with all this 1900-1925 and then socialist realism b/c of the thaw ~

Question: How is Bely's Petersburg modernist?

• Experimentation with social themes which is not new to modernism pushing against the old dissatisfaction with the present, trying to get rid of the past. • Crazy things going on with time b/c it goes back and forth in time. • Playing with time is very modernist (perhaps) • Experimentation with dialog, we don't know who is talking and the narrator is all over the place a modernist narrator.

Difference between physiological sketches and Turgenev's Khor Kalich:

• So the difference here, is that the peasants have agency vs physiological sketchs everything Is straightforward. Here they are more complex there is an implicit respect for the peasants. Contradiction elevates their image and it humanizes them. • The sketch's claim to understand people way too quickly...so by making them less admirable they become more human and therefore more like us. • In the sketches narrator controls language and thought and the poor embody physical suffering which makes them stay only on the physical plane, but Khor is re-defining how he sees things: he is a free intellectual human being who is interpreted in traveling and the narrators travel. • Khor and Kalinich = its what the sketches should have been, if they wanted to show a real picture of poor, peasant life. You can see, the narrator interacting with the peasant and we can then see what questions he asks and what questions are answered, he gives Khor agency vs sketches where its "I talked to them" but what did Grigorovich say to them? We don't know so here, Turgenev reinstates the actual talking to people which lets them have agency, they get to define themselves by how they react to the things that people say to them around them • So when you shift methods gives Khor a certain dignity and a power to be re-defined by his mind....