Reading Backwards: an Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature
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M Reading Backwards An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature READING BACKWARDS EDITED BY MUIREANN MAGUIRE AND TIMOTHY LANGEN An Advance Retrospective This book outlines with theoretical and literary historical rigor a highly innovative approach to the writing of Russian literary history and to the reading of canonical Russian texts. on Russian Literature AGUI —William Mills Todd III, Harvard University Russian authors […] were able to draw their ideas from their predecessors, but also from their successors, R testifying to the open-mindedness that characterizes the Slavic soul. This book restores the truth. E AND —Pierre Bayard, University of Paris 8 This edited volume employs the paradoxical notion of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’—developed in the 1960s L by the ‘Oulipo’ group of French writers and thinkers—as a mode for reading Russian literature. Reversing established critical approaches to the canon and literary influence, its contributors ask us to consider how ANGEN reading against linear chronologies can elicit fascinating new patterns and perspectives. Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature re-assesses three major nineteenth- century authors—Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—either in terms of previous writers and artists who ( plagiarized them (such as Raphael, Homer, or Hall Caine), or of their own depredations against later writers EDS (from J.M. Coetzee to Liudmila Petrushevskaia). ) R ) Far from suggesting that past authors literally stole from their descendants, these engaging essays, contributed by both early-career and senior scholars of Russian and comparative literature, encourage us to identify the contingent and familiar within classic texts. By moving beyond rigid notions of cultural heritage and literary canons, they demonstrate that inspiration is cyclical, influence can flow in multiple directions, and no idea is ever truly original. This book will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Russian Studies. The introductory EADING discussion of the origins and context of ‘plagiarism by anticipation’, alongside varied applications of the concept, will also be of interest to those working in the wider fields of comparative literature, reception studies, and translation studies. B This is the author-approved edition of this Open Access title. As with all Open Book publications, this entire ACKWA book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: Nadezhda Udaltsova, Mashinistka (1910s). Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:N._Udaltsova_-_Typewriter_girl,_1910s.jpg, Public Domain. Cover Design by Anna Gatti. R DS book eebook and OA editions EDITED BY MUIREANN MAGUIRE also available AND TIMOTHY LANGEN OBP READING BACKWARDS Reading Backwards An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature Edited by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2021 Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapter’s author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen (eds), Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0241 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0241#copyright. Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0241#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 9781800641198 ISBN Hardback: 9781800641204 ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800641211 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800641228 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781800641235 ISBN Digital (XML): 9781800641242 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0241 Cover image: Nadezhda Udaltsova, Mashinistka (1910s). Wikimedia, https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N._Udaltsova_-_Typewriter_girl,_1910s.jpg, Public Domain. Cover Design by Anna Gatti. Contents Contributor Biographies vii Acknowledgements xi Introduction: Countersense and Interpretation xiii Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen I. Gogol xxvii 1. Something for Nothing: Imagination and Collapse in O’Brien, 1 Krzhizhanovsky, and Gogol Timothy Langen 2. Seeing Backwards: Raphael’s Portrait of Nikolai Vasil’evich 27 Gogol Ilya Vinitsky II. Dostoevsky 51 3. The Voice of Ivan: Ethical Plagiarism in Dostoevsky and Coetzee 53 Michael Bowden 4. Foretelling the Past: Fyodor Dostoevsky Follows Guzel’ Yakhina 79 into the Heart of Darkness David Gillespie and Marina Korneeva 5. Notes from the Other Side of the Chronotope: Dostoevsky 101 Anticipating Petrushevskaia Inna Tigountsova III. Tolstoy 127 6. Master and Manxman: Reciprocal Plagiarism in Tolstoy and Hall 129 Caine Muireann Maguire vi Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature 7. The Posteriority of the Anterior: Levinas, Tolstoy, and 159 Responsibility for the Other Steven Shankman 8. From Sky to Sea: When Andrei Bolkonskii Voiced Achilles 189 Svetlana Yefimenko Afterword: But Seriously, Folks…. (Pierre Bayard and the Russians) 221 Eric Naiman List of Figures 263 Index 265 Contributor Biographies Michael Bowden is a postgraduate researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Leeds. His dissertation topic explores Dostoevsky’s influence over novels by J. M. Coetzee, David Foster Wallace and Atiq Rahimi, with a particular focus on the ethical implications of the polyphonic novel form. He received his BA and MA from the University of Manchester. David Gillespie taught Russian to BA and MA students at the University of Bath, UK, from 1985 to 2016, when he retired as Professor of Russian Studies. He also taught Russian language to UK Ministry of Defence interpreters on a part-time basis at the University of Bristol from 1986 until 2011. He is currently Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Tomsk State University, and Honorary Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has published ten monographs, including Iurii Trifonov: Unity through Time (1993), and Russian Cinema (2003); over seventy peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles, and presented over 100 papers at conferences in the UK, USA, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Croatia and Russia. He recently completed editing and updating the fourth edition of Terence Wade’s definitive A Comprehensive Russian Grammar, xxxiii + 601 pp., published by Wiley-Blackwell (USA and UK) in May 2020. He is currently working on a monograph (A History of Russian Literature on Film), to be published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Marina Korneeva gained her Candidate of Sciences degree in 2018 and is currently studying for her doctorate in foreign language teaching methodology at Tomsk State University. Since 2017 she has published over twenty peer-reviewed articles. Her monograph, based on her Candidate of Sciences thesis Teaching Foreign Languages to Students of viii Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature Applied Mechanics through the Case Study Method, will be published by Tomsk University Press in 2021. Timothy Langen teaches Russian language, literature, and cultural history at the University of Missouri. His research interests include the writings of Nikolai Gogol, Andrey Bely, and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and the intellectual history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Russia. He is author of The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely’s “Petersburg” (2005) and co-editor and co-translator, with Justin Weir, of Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays (2000). Muireann Maguire lectures in Russian Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the principal researcher on ‘RusTrans, The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA’ (2019–23), an academic project funded by the European Research Council. Her academic specializations include Gothic-fantastic literature, the fictional representation of pregnancy and childbirth, and the nineteenth-century Russian novel. Her book Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature was published by Peter Lang in 2012. She has published articles on Russian literature in Modern Language Review, Slavic Review, the Slavonic and East European Review, and other journals. Eric Naiman teaches Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (1997) and