Sovereign Fictions: Poetics and Politics in the Age of Russian Realism (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226831879)

An exploration of Russian realist fiction reveals a preoccupation with the absolutist state.

The nineteenth-century novel is generally assumed to owe its basic social imaginaries to the ideologies, institutions, and practices of modern civil society. In Sovereign Fictions, Ilya Kliger asks what happens to the novel when its fundamental sociohistorical orientation is, as in the case of Russian realism, toward the state. Kliger explores Russian realism's distinctive construals of sociality through a broad range of texts from the 1830s to the 1870s, including major works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Goncharov, and Turgenev, and several lesser-known but influential books of the period, including Alexander Druzhinin's Polinka Saks (1847), Aleksei Pisemsky's One Thousand Souls (1858), and Vasily Sleptsov's Hard Times (1865). Challenging much current scholarly consensus about the social dynamics of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Sovereign Fictions offers an important intervention in socially inflected theories of the novel and in current thinking on representations of power and historical poetics.

Author: Ilya Kliger
ISBN-10: 0226831876
ISBN-13: 9780226831879
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 04/05/2024
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.96lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.67d