University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations Spring 2019 Russian Roots in Southern Soil James Preston Edge Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Edge, J.(2019). Russian Roots in Southern Soil. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/5222 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RUSSIAN ROOTS IN SOUTHERN SOIL by James Preston Edge Bachelor of Arts University of Georgia, 2011 Master of Arts University of Georgia, 2014 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2019 Accepted by: Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Major Professor Eli Jelly-Schapiro, Committee Member Catherine Keyser, Committee Member Alexander Ogden, Committee Member Cheryl L. Addy, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School © Copyright by James Preston Edge, 2019 All Rights Reserved ii Dedication For my mother, Connie Diann Herndon Edge iii Acknowledgements Throughout the writing of this dissertation, I have received a great deal of support and assistance. I would first like to thank my advisor, Dr. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. Your guidance and insight have been immense, and I appreciate the patience you have exhibited in my journey through the USC doctoral program. I would also like to thank my committee of Dr. Eli Jelly-Schapiro, Dr. Catherine Keyser, and Dr. Alexander Ogden. Your thoughtful comments in our conversations and on my drafts have been invaluable. I hope I can, in some minor way, replicate your approaches to mentoring and scholarship. Most importantly, I would like to thank my wife, Dana. Without you, this project would not have been completed. Thank you for enduring my far too frequent aloofness during our dinners and conversations. Your encouragement has been unwavering, your support has been uplifting, and I am so incredibly humbled to be your husband. You are my soul mate. iv Abstract This dissertation explores the profound influence that 19th-century Russian authors had on 20th-century Southern writers. Recent analyses of the American South have looked to the fluid nature of this region’s borders, often spreading into the Caribbean, South America, and American West, but there has not yet been any book- length study of the ways in which several Russian literary masters, including Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, influenced Southern authors, particularly Ernest Gaines, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. In particular, these Southern authors, in interviews and essays, have repeatedly extolled these Russian figures for their elevation of communal folklore, ways of confronting post-war defeat and identity crises, understanding of their own country’s ostracism by surrounding nations and domestic social hierarchies, and the establishment of a national literature. I want to suggest that these Southern authors recognized an analogous existence in these Russians’ works and sought to not only appreciate and extol their writing but to replicate it in their own texts, frequently utilizing the same formal and stylistic conventions. In embracing the templates put forth by their Russian inspirations, these Southerners found a way to understand their own collisions with indignities and ostracism as well as the methods by which culture could be restored and preserved in a respectable, literary tradition. v Table of Contents Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Abstract ................................................................................................................................v Chapter 1: A Proper Descendant, More Than a Cousinly Resemblance .............................1 Chapter 2: Ivan Turgenev and Ernest Gaines ....................................................................16 Structural Influence and Generational Conflict .....................................................24 Folktales, Myths, and Supernatural Capabilities ...................................................41 Chapter 3: Anton Chekhov and Eudora Welty ..................................................................57 Storms, Inspiration, and Fate .................................................................................64 Noncommunication and Silence ............................................................................88 Chapter 4: Fyodor Dostoevsky and Richard Wright ........................................................102 Exile, Indignity, and Empathy .............................................................................107 Raskolnikovs ........................................................................................................129 Chapter 5: Southern Horizons ..........................................................................................151 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................153 vi Chapter 1: A Proper Descendant, More Than a Cousinly Resemblance 1941 was a significant year in American history for numerous reasons, including the United States of America’s entry into World War II, the first publication of a Captain America comic, and the premier of acclaimed films Dumbo and Citizen Kane, so it is no surprise that the publication of Carson McCullers’ “Books I Remember” is often forgotten. In this essay, the Georgia-born author expounds upon the most important texts she encountered throughout her life, paying particular attention to those that significantly impacted her career as a writer. As might be expected, her initial reflections focus primarily on texts populated by “robbers, wicked giants, and anyone outside respectable society” who endured plagues, shipwrecks, and Indian massacres (McCullers 464). In addition to these wildly adventurous tales, McCullers also reminisces on enduring classics that were particularly important on her maturation as a reader and thinker, which were Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, and Little Women. These novels evoked in McCullers a sense of wonder and an emotional depth that would reside within her throughout her remainder of her life; however, even these books were not the most important ones in her life. The most significant change in her reading history, one where “books suddenly take on a new meaning” and draw one “to the richer and more dramatic adventures of the soul,” came “when, at thirteen, [she] read the great Russians” (McCullers 465, 466). 1 The masterpieces of Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot, “opened the door to an immense and marvelous new world” for McCullers, and the “amazement” and “sense of wonder,” she wrote, would continue to take hold of her until the end of her life (McCullers 466). For her, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov were authors with whom she could relate, even though they had been born on the other side of the planet, as she remarked upon their thematic, metaphorical proximity: “The hot lazy Russian summers, the lonely villages on the steppes, the old grandfathers who sleep with the children on the stove, the white winters of Saint Petersburg--these are as close to me as scenes from my own home town” (McCullers 466). Only a few months after the publication of “Books I Remember,” McCullers would expand upon these feelings of appreciation and familiarity in her essay “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature” (1941), famously claiming: Modern Southern writing seems rather to be most indebted to Russian literature, to be the progeny of the Russian realists. And this influence is not accidental. The circumstances under which Southern literature has been produced are strikingly like those under which the Russians functioned. In both old Russia and the South up to the present time a dominant characteristic was the cheapness of human life. (McCullers 252) The cheapness of human life described by McCullers links American slavery and Russian serfdom, which had been a feature of Russian society since the implementation of the serf system in Russia in 1649 and “was not technically slavery,” even though these two systems had many similarities, as the participants were indentured to a certain degree (Lynch). In serfdom, the “landowner did not own the serf” and “the serf was bound to the 2 lord” solely because of the land on which the serf lived (Lynch). There are minor differences in these systems, however, and the reality of the racial division between white ownership and black and brown human chattel in the American South is impossible to ignore. Furthermore, William C. Hines has asserted that the Russian serf’s experience was slightly “‘more varied and complex than its American counterpart’” mainly due to the “time-honored relationship between peasants and the land,” whereby the landowner was responsible for the well being of the peasants is also a minor alteration (Wills). 1861’s Emancipation Statute issued by Tsar Alexander II changed this system definitively, because serfs were “made legally free