Classical Allusions and Imperial Desire: Problems of Identity in Georgian and Russian Literature Mary Evelynne Childs Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor James D. West Department of Slavic Languages and Literature This dissertation explores cultural and political aspects of the relationship between Russia and Georgia, through the lens of Classical allusions. Since ancient Greek and Roman times, Classical myths and tales have been re-written by successive generations to reflect on critical political and social issues, including questions of empire and national identity. In Russia and Georgia, such a use of the Classics has been perhaps even more marked than in Western Europe. Straddling Asia and the West, Russians appreciate access to the western Classics as a touchstone of their belonging to Europe. Georgia, on Russia’s southern border, is actually home to several famous Classical mythological characters, including Prometheus, Medea, and her father Aeëtes, and its claim to these figures provokes a sense of cultural competition with Russia. In negotiating political and cultural control in the Caucasus, Russia, imagining itself as a neo-Roman Empire, may lay claim to ruling the physical space, imaging itself as a harbinger of civilization for the “uncultured barbarians” on its southern border. Georgia, however, has developed its own sense of nationhood, claiming a spiritual hegemony as an empire of humanism, embracing its ties to Hellenism. Applying a thread of post-colonial theory both to think about Empire from within the hegemonic empire itself, and to listen to voices from the margins, my dissertation is structured on the process of veiling, unveiling, and self-unveiling, and how the use and manipulation of Classical allusions aid in this process. From the common language of Classical references emerges an intellectual space in which the authors I study, the Russians Andrei Bitov, Liudmila Ulitskaia, the Georgian-Armenian, Bulat Okudzhava, and the Georgian, Otar Chiladze, articulate their hopes, passions and desires, a space for their various voices to be heard. Read together, they tell a larger story about the relationship between Russia and Georgia. Touching upon how empire is conceived, imagined and generated, they reflect their countries’ shared and intertwined history that includes conflict, disappointment, the problem of dealing with Stalin’s legacy, and a strong desire from both parties to be accepted as full and active members in the increasingly complex post-Soviet world.

Classical Allusions and Imperial Desire: Problems of Identity in Georgian and Russian Literature

Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestoes, 1912-1928

In examining the development of Tsvetaeva's lyric verse, it is possible to discern a recurrent thematic strain: a rejection by the poet of the conventional roles imposed on the individual by society, particularly certain characteristics of the feminine role. I will try to show that Tsvetaeva, in the process of rejecting, via her poetry, this key ingredient in a person's self-concept—namely, the sex role as defined by society—along with a rejection of other limiting social norms, developed images of the self that transcend social roles. Moreover, the working out of this poetic identity is not continuous but falls into several chronological stages. In discussing a poet's self, critical method prescribes that a distinction be maintained between the individual and the poetic persona. Without negating this methodological stricture, it is important to keep in mind that for some poets an adequate interpretation requires one to perceive that the persona is an elaborate poetic projection and mythologization of the individual.

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The Feminine Stereotype and Beyond: Role Conflict and Resolution in the Poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva

https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/9593tw154

Immortals are not men: Maiakovskii, the Strugatskii brothers, and the New Soviet Man

Author(s): Feldman, Leah Michele | Advisor(s): Mufti, Aamir; Rorlich, Azade-Ayse | Abstract: This dissertation considers the foundation of discourses of Orientalism and Postcolonialism in representations of the Caucasus in the literature of Russians and Muslims of the empire from 1828 through 1920. From the mid-nineteenth century through World War I, the Russian empire continued an era of expansion, colonizing the diverse ethnic and cultural territories of the Muslim Caucasus and Central Asia. The oil boom, the creation of an international Turkic language press, the spread of Russian language education and the construction of the Transcaspian Baku-Batumi Railroad during this period all contributed to the development of a cosmopolitan literary and artistic scene in the administrative and industrial capitals of Tbilisi and Baku. While discussions about the destiny of the Russian Empire - its relationship to the European Enlightenment, Byzantium and its own imperial acquisitions percolated in Moscow and Petersburg, debates about the role of Islam and language politics as well as Pan-Turkic, Pan-Islamic and proletarian discourses of identity dominated discussions among writers and thinkers in the Caucasus. Russian writers imagined a civic identity amidst an expanding empire, and in so doing, they represented the Caucasus as a space of freedom, heroism and spiritual enlightenment. I trace the ways in which Muslim writers and thinkers of the Caucasus translated and transformed this imaginary, debating the role of Islam and language politics in the construction of supranational discourses of cultural, ethnic and political identity. Building on Edward Said's theory of Orientalism and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of narrative discourse, I present a portrait of the intellectual milieu between a series of intertextual encounters across Europe, Russia and the Turkic Muslim world.My dissertation is organized into four chapters, each of which addresses intertextual encounters in these diverse literary traditions. My first chapter, "Heterodoxy and Heteroglossia: Axundov on the Threshold of Russian Literature" discusses Mirza Fatali Akhundov's contribution to the foundation of a modern Azeri literary tradition through his invocation of Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin's orientalist literary legacy. Drawing upon Pushkin's representation of the Caucasian imaginary as a prophetic legacy of freedom, Axundov generates supranational texts that incorporate diverse Islamic, Russian and European theological, philosophical, cultural and political discourses. My second chapter, "Prisoners of the Caucasian Imaginary: Lermontov and Kazy-Girei's Heroes in Exile" examines the idea of heroism in Russian Romantic representations of the Caucasus through the Caucasian tales of Mikhail Iur'evich Lermontov and a Russophone story by the Adyghe writer Sultan Kazy-Girei. I illustrate the ways Kazy-Girei contests and expands the ideas of heroism embedded in Russian representations of the Caucasus through his foundational contribution to Muslim Russophone literature. My third chapter, "Textual Deviance in Russian Empire: Gogol' and Mammedquluzadeh's Parodic Innovations," discusses the comedic space of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Comparing the works of Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol and the Azeri writer Jalil Mammedquluzadeh, I discuss the role of textual deviance in Russian literature. Though Gogol's work entered a supranational Soviet literary space through his appropriation by Formalist literary critics, this chapter highlights the importance of his work in the literature of the Muslims of the Russian empire more broadly, as well the early twentieth century in the Caucasus. My final chapter, "Translating Early Twentieth Century Baku: The Romantic Poetic Futures of the Russian and Azeri Avant-gardes," examines the role of Romantic poetics in the emergence of revolutionary and early Soviet politics. I compare the works of Russian writers in Baku, including Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh, Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Maiakovskii to the works of the Azeri writers Abbas Sahhat, Mehammed Hadi, and Mikayil Rafili. In so doing, this chapter illustrates the role of the Baku avant-garde in shaping Soviet hegemony, as well as diverse forms of anti-imperial agency. This moment in the formation of the Soviet Union, envisioned from the vantage point of the Caucasus, frames my discussion of the architecture of a supranational literary tradition informed by Russian Orientalism, anti-imperial Soviet hegemony, and postcolonial politics.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt3053917v/qt3053917v.pdf

On the Threshold of Eurasia: Intersecting Discourses of Empire and Identity in the Russian Empire

Simon Karlinsky has substantially expanded and revised the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson's correspondence to include fifty-nine letters discovered subsequent to the book's original publication in 1979. Since then, five volumes of Edmund Wilson's diaries have been published, as well as a volume of Nabokov's correspondence with other people and Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography of Nabokov. The additional letters and a considerable body of new annotations clarify the correspondence, tracing in greater detail the two decades of close friendship between the writers.

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971 (Revised and Expanded Edition)

Through careful textual readings of Gogol's most famous works, Karlinsky argues that Gogol's homosexual orientation--which Gogol himself could not accept or forgive in himself--may provide the missing key to the riddle of Gogol's personality. \"A brilliant new biography that will long be prized for its illuminating psychological insights into Gogol's actions, its informative readings of his fiction and drama, and its own stylistic grace and vivacity.\"--Edmund White, Washington Post Book World

Simon Karlinsky

Papers

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971 (Revised and Expanded Edition)

The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971

Vladimir Nabokov's Novel Dar as a Work of Literary Criticism: A Structural Analysis

The Nabokov-Wilson letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971