UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Invention of Russia in America, 1880-1920 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9h04h57r Author Dobrushin, Maxim Publication Date 2018 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE INVENTION OF RUSSIA IN AMERICA, 1880-1920 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Maxim Dobrushin December 2018 The Dissertation of Maxim Dobrushin is approved: Professor Susan Gillman, Chair Professor Kirsten Gruesz Professor Tyrus Miller Professor Steven Cassedy Lori Kletzer Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Maxim Dobrushin 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….iv Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………..…..vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One A Climate of Flexibility: Russian Translation Philosophy and Practice in the Nineteenth-Century U.S………33 Chapter Two America’s “Immaturity”: Russian Aesthetic “Truth” in the U.S.…………………………………..…………...84 Chapter Three Narratives of Failure: The Politics of Realism in the U.S. Novel………………………………………….123 Bibliography…………………………………………………………….....…….…161 iii ABSTRACT The Invention of Russia in America, 1880-1920 Maxim Dobrushin The Invention of Russia in America aims to breaks new ground by exploring an international phenomenon that was well-known in the nineteenth century but has since become an under-studied moment in U.S. literature and culture: the rise of Russian culture and politics at a time when the U.S. was considering new methods of literary representation, art-criticism, and language. My dissertation argues for the multi-directional influence at the turn-of-the-century of Russian realism and Russian revolutionary nihilism and anarchism in the U.S., shaping American literary realism, the popular novel, and translation theory. The project begins with the U.S.’s foremost Russian-to-English translators, Nathan Haskell Dole, Benjamin Tucker, Isabel Hapgood, and Constance Garnett, all of whom work with what I call “flexible translation.” Flexible translation points to U.S. Russian translators’ reliance on bio- genetic pseudoscience, how racialized theories of climate zones and geography represented language as an extension of a nation’s environmental and national development, as well as a stand-in for Russian writers, equating their greatness and universality with Russian literature. Such a theory of language influenced the reception of Russian aesthetic theory in the U.S. by writers across multiple zones, including the canonical (William Dean Howells), the ‘ethnic’ (Abraham Cahan), and Russian emigres (Petr Kropotkin). These writers argued for the sacrality of language through art-criticism, which sought to compensate for U.S. “immaturity” through iv Russian figurations of the literary critic as a torch-bearer of intellectual progress. I argue that Howells, Cahan, and Kropotkin sought to use the theories of Russian art- criticism to develop democracy and inclusivity by drawing on altruistic forms of evolutionary discourse, derived from Herbert Spencer. Finally, the dissertation concludes by exploring what I call “narratives of failure,” realist novels that rely on nihilist themes and the principles of art-criticism to explore democracy and inclusivity. These novels include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886), and Cahan’s The White Terror and the Red (1905). By exploring the ideals of art-criticism through novels that depict social change in the making, I seek to show how narratives of failure choose to ignore the fissures of the present by substituting narrative harmony into the future, resulting in the failure of democracy and inclusivity to take hold. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Invention of Russia in America was completed under the guidance of my dissertation committee: Susan Gillman, Kirsten Gruesz, Tyrus Miller, and Steven Cassedy. In the course of researching material for each chapter and writing this dissertation, I was also assisted by William Nickell, who provided me with a list of several key Russian critical works, and Gabriella Safran, who encouraged me to take her Russian Realism course at Stanford University and led our guided reading seminar. I would like to express my gratitude for each person’s time and commitment, and I’m particularly grateful for Professor Cassedy’s willingness and generosity to serve on my committee. I also want to acknowledge and thank people in my life who enabled me to write this dissertation by providing their love, encouragement, and friendship. These people are part of my non-academic life, and I am forever thankful for their contributions to my life and work. Thank you to my mother, Olga, for her patience and encouragement; to my stepfather, Alex, for his support and belief; and to Lena, for her all-encompassing wisdom and care. I’d like to express my appreciation to Tara Thomas for reading earlier versions of my chapters during our informal writing group sessions. I would also like to thank Joseph for deepening my awareness of life. Finally, thank you to my father, Val. I find myself not having the space to thank all who have been part of my life during this writing process, but these people are in my thoughts and have been thanked many times by me in person. vi INTRODUCTION In 1941, Professor Robert Erskine Ely––praised by Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1941, as a man that “has known as many of the great figures in the world of art, music, politics, science, international affairs and literature as any other one person now living in this great city [New York][,]” (Roosevelt)––took the Russian anarchist, Petr Kropotkin, to call on the widow of the president of the Confederacy (Avrich 97). The widow of Jefferson Davis was expecting a call from Ely and Kropotkin, but instead encountered Booker T. Washington, who went in search of Ely only to end up in the same hotel lobby as Mrs. Davis (Avrich 97). Upon the request of Mrs. Davis, Washington was introduced to her, and “the anarchist prince, the black educator, and the widow of a slave-owning president” “conversed as if it were a most ordinary occasion” (Avrich 97). What were the political and cultural conditions that placed the anarchist prince, the black educator, and the widow in dialogue with one another? The historical affiliation between Russia and America shows a cultural and political syncretism that simultaneously defines and redefines the perceptions of each nation: during various periods, the U.S. created its own version of Russia through translation, novels, art, and literary criticism while Russia had its own versions of the U.S. These affiliations have a deep history. In the case of this triadic, comical meeting, the political cause of Russian anarchism found a wide audience in America; anarchism reinforced a conception of democratic liberalism that challenged the Czarist autocracy in Russia while countering the contradictions and paradoxes in America’s form of 1 government––best represented, among other examples, by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the Dawes Act (1887), two acts that specifically went against democratic values because they excluded certain groups from representation and constitutional rights. A burgeoning cultural dialogue between these nations, furthermore, was created through genres and institutions that would come to define the cultural imaginary of Russia in America, an invention, I argue, that begins with the start of the Crimean War. This historical conjuncture produced what I call (adapting Maurice Samuels’s 2010 title Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France) the process of “inventing Russia” in nineteenth-century America (Samuels). The word “invent” stresses the unique version of Russia in the U.S. during this moment by studying its inventions through translation, literary criticism, and the realist novel; during other time periods, this invention––and hence version––will vary. This dissertation explores the intersections where these exchanges and mediations occurred, specifically the modes and genres that first reflected Russian aesthetic theory in America—from travel writing, to popular history, to historical fiction, and to literary criticism, genres that were popular in both the U.S. and Russia. Some inventions occur through the translation practice of Russian texts in America and through the politics and aesthetics that intertwined in the American culture of letters to simultaneously allow U.S. literature to develop its supposed immaturity and adhere to European realist principles while advocating for the uplifting of the working class. 2 Scholars Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby have attempted to historicize American literature’s changing relationship to the aesthetic while paying attention to ideology, historicity, and politics, in what has been called the “aesthetic turn” (Weinstein and Looby). Critics working in this frame attempt to question the critical view that writing about the aesthetic produces a disregard for politics. My study of Russia and America during the nineteenth-century presents a case of intimately intertwined politics and aesthetics in the literary, cultural, and political scenes. Writers, critics, anarchists, and nihilists of multiple nationalities and linguistic