Bowers Katherine, Kokobobo Ani. (Ed.) Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism

Cambridge University Press, 2015. — xi, 304 p. — ISBN 978-1-107-07321-0.Russian literature has a reputation for gloomy texts, especially during the late nineteenth century. This volume argues that a 'fin-de-siècle' mood informed Russian literature long before the chronological end of the nineteenth century, in ways that had significant impact on the development of Russian realism. Some chapters consider ideas more readily associated with fin-de-siècle Europe such as degeneration theory, biodeterminism, Freudian psychoanalysis or apocalypticism, alongside earlier Russian realist texts by writers such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Other chapters explore the changes that realism underwent as modernism emerged, examining later nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century texts in the context of the earlier realist tradition or their own cultural moment. Overall, a team of emerging and established scholars of Russian literature and culture present a wide range of creative and insightful readings that shed new light on later realism in all its manifestations.Anxieties of disintegration
The Russian Rougon-Macquart: Degeneration and biological determinism in The Golovlev Family. Kate Holland
The hiding places of the self in Dostoevsky’s Adolescent. Yuri Corrigan
A childhood’s garden of despair: Dostoevsky and “A Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party”. Robin Feuer Miller
The railway and the elemental force: Slavophilism, Pan-Slavism, and apocalyptic anxieties in Anna Karenina. Alexander Burry and S. Ceilidh OrrDestabilizing gender and sexuality
“Mister Russian Beast”: Civilization’s discontents in Turgenev. Emma Lieber
Masculine degeneration in Dostoevsky’s Demons. Connor Doak
The burden of superfluity: Reconsidering female heroism in Chekhov’s The Seagull. Jenny KaminerGeneric experimentation and hybridity
The fall of the house: Gothic narrative and the decline of the Russian family. Katherine Bowers
Corpses of desire and convention: Tolstoy’s and Artsybashev’s grotesque realism. Ani Kokobobo
The little man in the overcoat: Gogol and Krzhizhanovsky. Muireann Maguire
Icons, eclipses, and stepping off the train: Vladimir Korolenko and the ocherk. Jane CostlowFacing death and decay
Decadent ecosystems in Uncle Vanya: A chorographic meditation. Thomas Newlin
The mute body: Leonid Andreev’s abject realism. Edith W. Clowes
The thinking oyster: Turgenev’s “drama of dying” as the decay of Russian realism. Ilya VinitskyAfterword: On the potential of ends. Caryl Emerson