In this dissertation, I argue that the locus of Tsvetaevaseemingly conflicted views about art and the criteria for its evaluation is the tension between the rational, ethical, and distinctively human in us, and the irrational spontaneous impulse. Tsvetaevaterm for the irrational impulse is stikhiia, a force of nature that is...
Beside the Point: Places in Nabokov's The Gift Peter-John Thomas This dissertation is devoted to the habits of thought embodied in Vladimir Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift. Nabokov is famous for creating intricate verbal structures which, however, resist conversion into rigorous propositions. Two major categories of critical response have...
his dissertation traces the presence of early Soviet satire in several major prose works. My project examines Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Yuri Olesha's Envy, Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit, and Mikhail Zoshchenko's prose trilogy (Youth Restored, The Sky-Blue Book and Before Sunrise) as literary works that incorporated and...
This dissertation investigates the nature of apocalyptic fiction in the first Soviet decade. In my introduction, I consider the secondary or underground status that apocalyptic thought assumed during this period vis a vis the prevailing cultural ethos of utopianism. I assert that Russian literary apocalyptic persisted as a genre by...