The Redemption of the “Superfluous Man” in Russian Literature By Christopher Henry Carr B.B.A. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998 M.A. Middlebury College, 2004 M.A. Brown University, 2012 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND May 2016 © Copyright 2016 by Christopher Henry Carr This dissertation by Christopher Henry Carr is accepted in its present form by the Department of Slavic Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date_____________ _________________________________ Vladimir Golstein, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date_____________ _________________________________ Svetlana Evdokimova, Reader Date_____________ _________________________________ Alexander Levitsky, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_____________ _________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Christopher Henry Carr was born in Jackson Heights, New York in 1976. He received a B.B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1998, an M.A. in Russian from Middlebury College in 2004, an M.A. in Slavic Studies from Brown University in 2012, and a Ph.D. in Slavic Studies from Brown University in 2016. Prior to his doctoral studies, Christopher taught English composition and literature several colleges in New York City. During his time at Brown, he has taught the Russian language, served as a teaching assistant for Russian literature courses, and has taught writing courses at Providence College and in Brown’s summer pre-college program. Within the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown, Christopher has co-organized graduate student conferences and colloquia, one of which was funded by a grant from Brown’s Office of International Studies in 2010-11. He has also co-edited an issue of Brown Slavic Contributions (Volume XIV: Estrangement) and a collection entitled Fiction Beyond Fiction: Dostoevsky’s Quest for Realism. Christopher has published two articles: “The Anecdote as Anti-Ideology in Sergey Dovlatov’s Nashi” (Brown Slavic Contributions, Vol. XIV: Estrangement, 2013) and “The Innocences of Revolution: Failed Utopias and Nostalgic Longings in Evgenii Zamyatin’s We and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog” (Innocence Uncovered: Literary and Theological Perspectives, forthcoming from Ashgate, 2016). iv PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS If I didn’t understand W. H. Auden’s statement that “a real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us” before I came to Brown, then I certainly learned this over the seven years of my doctoral studies. Writing this dissertation proved to me beyond any doubt just how personal academic writing is, as the questions that I investigate in this project are the same ones that I have wrestled with for much of my adult life—freedom, conformity, and the search for home and roots. While New York and my family members will always be home to me, there was always something missing that the city and even America could not provide. After working for a year after my undergraduate education, I felt the need to travel in order to seek this missing piece. Although I do have some Russian roots, my foray into Russian language and culture began with a serendipitous Peace Corps assignment to live in Uzbekistan for two years. It is a powerful thing to realize for the first time that you can choose part of your own identity. Or perhaps sometimes an identity chooses you. Russian always felt natural to me, as I was powerfully aware that I was speaking the language of some of my ancestors. For the conscious individual, Russia—its geographical space, its concept, its culture, and especially its literature—is a sacred space, and I am grateful to all who let me into their homes, for an hour or a year. It was unintentional, yet I cannot deny that I v received more than I gave, and I hope this project can be viewed by all of those people whose paths crossed mine as a sort of compensation (although I could never pay in full for what this journey has given me) for sharing their lives and their homes with me. I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Vladimir Golstein, for his support of my project and for his advice on how to frame this dissertation, which covers a great deal of ground. It would have been much easier in many ways to have based this work on any one of my individual chapters, so I am grateful for his encouragement. I would like to thank Professor Svetlana Evdokimova for serving as one of my readers and for her suggestions that extended far beyond this project. I would like to thank my third reader, Professor Alexander Levitsky, not only for providing important questions for me to consider on this and other academic work, but also for taking a chance on me seven years ago when I had been teaching English and had been away from my Russian studies for several years. Special thanks also go to: the late Professor Abbott Gleason for working with me independently as I struggled to make sense of the complex nineteenth-century Russian intellectual and philosophical climate that provided the foundation for this project, as well as several other academic pieces that I have written; Lynne deBenedette, for her patience and constant guidance as I learned how to teach the Russian language; Gisela Belton, without whom our department would simply cease to operate; and both Diana Dukhanova and Katie Krafft—the two other members of our 2009 cohort—for their willingness to discuss ideas, but most importantly for their personal support and friendship, which very appropriately was solidified during a summer spent wandering the streets of Petersburg. vi Over the past seven years, my life was primarily connected to the Department of Slavic Studies, but certainly not exclusively, and I would like to thank several people that have enriched—and continue to enrich—my life immeasurably. In no particular order, thanks and gratitude go to: Jonathan Readey, for his inspiring teaching and mentorship; James Chansky, for his support and for his willingness to commiserate about the present state of the humanities; John Rubadeau for teaching what is still the most influential class I have ever taken—a writing course that I took at the University of Michigan in my final semester in the spring of 1998—and for his constant reminders over the years about the importance of scratching an itch; Anya Ganzha, for all of our soulful talks that went late into the night in the kitchen at our rodnaya Proletarka; Dexter Jeffries, who taught me how to change sparkplugs and to chop wood, as well as how to teach, how to learn, and how to live in accordance with one’s inner self; Emily Hauer, for her kind words and her tough love; Emily Desrosiers, for being a supportive, generous soul; Jessica Tabak, for always checking in, whether I was writing this dissertation or grading piles of student papers; Carl Findley, for being a gentleman and a scholar; and Joseph Jones, who has been a true brother ever since our first conversation back in August 1999 on a jet-lagged bus ride from the Tashkent airport in the dead of night. And thank you, Russia—the physical place and the spiritual concept— for finding me and for helping me in my own search for identity and home. I love America, but, in the words of Alexander Blok (which was also used as an epigraph in Dovlatov’s The Suitcase): Да, и такой, моя Россия, / Ты всех краев дороже мне… vii Finally, I cannot express the love and gratitude that I feel for my immediate family members, who have always been supportive even when they didn’t understand why I was off on this adventure or that during the last twenty years. I don’t mean that disparagingly; most of the time I didn’t fully understand it, either. Eternal thanks to my parents for their dedication to their children and for teaching us to do the right thing, which is a lost art in today’s world; my sisters, Lesley and Samantha, for their thoughtfulness and their ability to always make me laugh, even when I didn’t want to; their husbands, Chris and Tom, in whom I have found two brothers; and my two nieces, Braelyn and Emma, who astonish me every second I am with them with their exuberance, fearlessness, and creativity. I will always, always, always be there for both of you as you seek your own paths toward home. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Things Fall Apart, the “Superflous Man” Cannot Hold Chapter One 23 Born of the Desert: Superfluous Lenses Chapter Two 78 The “Innocences of Revolution”: Failed Utopias, Nostalgic Longings, and the Battle for Time Chapter Three 144 Soviet Stagnation and the Escape from Time: A Pastoral Retreat in Cinema Chapter Four 198 Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One: Sergey Dovlatov’s Redemption at the End of Time Conclusion 253 The Good Place, or the Place that Doesn’t Exist Bibliography 277 ix INTRODUCTION Things Fall Apart, the “Superfluous Man” Cannot Hold In Oedipus at Colonus, the exiled former king of Thebes approaches the village of Colonus with Athens in one direction and the grove of the Furies in the background, to the right a heroic statue of a horseman and to the left a rocky ledge overshadowed by the woods. He ponders: “who will receive the wandering Oedipus today?”1 Antigone, who leads him by the hand and is his only connection to the material world, notices the city in the distance, distinguishing it from the grove of the Furies, which she says is clearly “holy ground.”2 Oedipus, blind and nearing the end of his life, wishes only to receive his “promised rest,” his “haven” of the grounds of the Awesome Goddesses that he wishes to make his home.3 Thus begins the final search to unite the stranger with his heritage, which is represented by “the spirit of the place, not much honored in legends, more in the hearts of us who live here, love it well.”4 1 Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans.