Caught between world wars and Stalin’s consolidation of power, citizens of Soviet Russia of the 1920s and 1930s had little to laugh about. Yet a unique tendency toward disruptive humor surfaces in poetry and prose over these two decades. I explore disruptive humor in select longer poetry of Nikolai Zabolotsky,...
Russia and Turkey occupy a significant portion of current global news as the rest of the world analyzes the trajectories of these countries. Most scholars focus on the socio-political landscapes of the two while disregarding cultural and literary studies. Such a top-down approach fails to consider the profound identity crises...
Though they lived a century apart and wrote in starkly disparate historical, cultural, and literary contexts, Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Mayakovsky were both victims of the posthumous processes of bureaucratization and monumentalization at the hands of the Soviet regime. Their biographies, politics, and poetry were sanitized and manipulated...
This dissertation explores the poetry and culture of the late-Soviet era of Stagnation (1964-1985) through a broadly conceived cultural metaphor of stagnation. The five Russian poets and one American poet in this study- Viktor Krivulin, Alexei Parshchikov, Aleksandr Eremenko, Ivan Zhdanov, Elena Shvarts, and Lyn Hejinian- each engage with a...
The Spectral Body: Theology and Economy in Dostoevsky and Melville’s Fiction This dissertation examines the intersections and tensions between religion and economy in Dostoevsky and Melville’s fiction. I argue that Christian theology of the body—as the site of both salvation and economic production—is at the center of their concern. These...
This project will describe, in part, the central theoretical problem of the avant-garde, in phenomenological, theoretical, and ultimately ontological terms. The object of this chapter will be to acquire an understanding of the tension between the improvised phenomenality of the avant-garde, and its assumption and hypostatization into discourse. In doing...
In my dissertation, I unveil a concept of the dramatic protagonist in Soviet drama that I propose to call a modern superfluous man. To note, this is not an attempt to trace the entirety of the superfluous man tradition from its origins to the present but rather a selective consideration,...
In the early part of the 20th Century, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union implemented a program of rapid industrialization under the slogan, “the conquest of nature by man.” Ambitious engineering projects such as the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Northern river reversal sought to restructure...
