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UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Money and Mad Ambition: Economies of Russian Literature 1830-1850 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ng5x5qp Author Porter, Jillian Elizabeth Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Money and Mad Ambition: Economies of Russian Literature 1830-1850 By Jillian Elizabeth Porter A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Harsha Ram, chair Professor Irina Paperno Professor Luba Golburt Professor Victoria Bonnell Spring 2011 Money and Mad Ambition: Economies of Russian Literature 1830-1850 © 2011 by Jillian Elizabeth Porter 1 Abstract Money and Mad Ambition: Economies of Russian Literature 1830-1850 by Jillian Elizabeth Porter Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Harsha Ram, chair This dissertation offers a sustained examination of the economic paradigms that structure meaning and narrative in Russian literature of the 1830s-1840s, the formative years of nineteenth-century Russian prose. Exploring works by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Faddei Bulgarin, I view tropes such as spending, counterfeiting, hoarding, and gambling, as well as plots of mad or blocked ambition, in relation to the cultural and economic history of Nicholas I’s reign and in the context of the importation of economic discourse and literary conventions from abroad. Furthermore, I consider the impact of culturally and economically conditioned affects—ambition, avarice, and embarrassment—on narrative tone. From the post-Revolutionary French plot of social ambition to the classic character type of the miser, the western economic models Russian writers routinely invoked seemed strangely out of place in Russia’s autocratic and serf-based society. At a historical moment when the question of Russian specificity was frequently posed with reference to Europe, and the modern European discourses of aesthetics, the emotions, and political economy were solidifying in opposition to one another, Russian writers made prolific and paradoxical use of economic paradigms to explore the role of literature and the nature of feeling in a society in which the state, rather than the bourgeoisie, was the primary motor of history. Incorporating the perspectives of New Economic Criticism as well as the history of emotions, Money and Mad Ambition strives to account for the interrelationship between Russian literature and economics in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. i CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, TRANSLATION, AND SOURCES iii INTRODUCTION iv PART I. MAD AMBITION Chapter 1. Origins and Diagnoses 2 Chapter 2. Plot and Tone 41 PART II. MONEY Chapter 3. Fantastic Counterfeiting: Money in Dostoevsky’s The Double 76 Chapter 4. Coin and Corpse: Reincarnations of the Miser in Pushkin, Gogol, 91 and Dostoevsky BIBLIOGRAPHY 132 APPENDIX 143 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my deep gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee. The time they have taken to read and respond carefully to drafts leaves me in awe, and their questions and suggestions will continue to guide me in the years ahead. From his enthusiasm about the project in its early stages, to his astonishingly articulate responses to my developing ideas and his dedicated editing of the final copy, Harsha Ram has been of immeasurable help. Irina Paperno’s professional advice and encouragement, along with her teaching, have inspired me since my first semester at Berkeley. Luba Golburt has consistently identified areas for improvement in my writing that open onto exciting new paths of discovery. Victoria Bonnell’s seminar on sociology of the everyday oriented me toward many of the subjects I have come to find most enchanting. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my parents and grandparents for all their love and support over the years. Their commitment not only to my education, but to the very idea of education in general, has been and remains for me a powerful source of motivation. I also owe many special debts to my wife, Hannah Freed-Thall. Restricting mention of them to the few most pertinent here, I thank her for the wonderful ideas and meals she has shared with me; the comments and criticisms she has offered on my writing; and, at the final hour, her willingness to wade through mysterious Russian titles to help compile my bibliography. Notwithstanding all the help I have received on this project, any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own. iii NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, TRANSLATION, AND SOURCES Transliterations throughout this dissertation follow the Library of Congress system, except when an anglicized name has been established by tradition (e.g. Gogol, Dostoevsky). In the Bibliography, however, I follow the LOC system for all Russian names. I have made minor changes to older Russian texts, consistent with modern orthography: For instance, I have changed “iat’” to “е” and “i” to “и,” and have removed “hard signs” from the ends of words. For all citations from Russian, I provide both the original text and English translations. For citations from foreign languages other than Russian, I provide English translations and the original text only when it is of particular linguistic or literary interest. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. When I have used existing translations, I have occasionally modified them and marked such changes in the Notes. iv INTRODUCTION In this dissertation I explore several of the fundamental discursive and economic contradictions permeating Russian literature and society in the 1830s-1840s, years that witnessed Pushkin’s turn to prose, the full breadth of Gogol’s literary career, and Dostoevsky’s debut as a writer.1 My overarching aim is to understand the relationship between Russian literature and economics in this period. I ask why economic plots and paradigms proved so productive of narratives in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and furthermore, why Russian authors routinely used economic metaphors to figure the writing, reading, and interpretation of literature. For example, in Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” (“Pikovaia dama,” 1834), gambling structures the story cyclically and serves as a master trope that figures the endless turns of Pushkin’s narrative game; in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi, 1842), the hero Chichikov’s accumulation of dead serfs’ names not only structures the plot, but also figures Gogol’s authorial accumulation of signs without referents; and in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double, the hero Goliadkin’s frantic spending of devalued paper currency drives the narrative in a series of fits and starts, erodes the distinction between signs of value and their counterfeits, and undermines the credibility of early Realist claims to linguistic referentiality. Exploring these and other works, I rely on the theoretical insights of Marc Shell and Jean- Joseph Goux, pioneers of a movement that has come to be called New Economic Criticism, as one point of departure.2 In particular, I have been inspired by Shell’s argument that literary texts are “economies” made up of “small tropic exchanges or metaphors, some of which can be analyzed in terms of signified economic content and all of which can be analyzed in terms of economic form,” and his suggestion that critics work to identify “the relation between such literary exchanges and the exchanges that constitute the political economy.”3 By analyzing the shared logic of linguistic and monetary values, Shell and Goux have shown that literary texts, whether they deal explicitly with economic themes or not, can be productively analyzed in connection with both the literariness of economic discourse and the facts of material economic history. Because the period of Russian literature at issue here is one that is marked by an explicitly economic orientation, contextualizing it with reference to the prevailing economic conditions and discourses with which it engages appears especially necessary. Ultimately, I would contend that some of the same economic and discursive contradictions that inspired Russian writers to focus their creative energies on economics also fostered the polyphony of Dostoevsky’s later novels. For this reason the present inquiry may be of interest to those with a 1 In focusing on the discursive and economic discrepancies shaping this period of Russian literature, I follow a clue Mikhail Bakhtin leaves in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics when he remarks that the “exceptionally acute contradictions of early Russian capitalism” (iskliuchitel’no rezkie protivorechiia rannego russkogo kapitalizma) provided the ideal historical conditions for the emergence of the polyphonic novel. M. M. Bakhtin, “Problemy poetika Dostoevskogo,” in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, vol. 6 (Moskva: Iazyki slavianskoi kul'tury, 1996), 45; M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 35. 2 Seminal texts of the New Economic Criticism include Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1990). For a very useful
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