The Dramatic Turn: Science, Theater, and Russian Literature at the End of the Nineteenth Century
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Slavic Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
Brunson, Molly
Abstract
This dissertation examines responses of artistic culture to science in late imperial Russia. In it, I argue that Russian prose writers turned to theater in order to explore scientific, technological, and industrial advancement. Notably, such renowned writers as Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Maksim Gorky engaged with scientific ideas through theater, both by experimenting with dramatic writing and by injecting dramatic modes into a functionally and aesthetically distinct prose fiction. This dramatic turn, as I refer to it, was possible because science and theater shared two critical features: both were intensely focused on the human body and ways of knowing the human subject beyond language. As such, theater was a particularly fitting medium to absorb the scientific, medical, and technological discoveries of the late nineteenth century. It simultaneously assimilated, corroborated, and challenged modern science, spotlighting its achievements and exposing its blind spots. This dissertation begins by delineating the cultural impact of the exchange between science, literature, and theater in late imperial Russia. I show that the multidimensional and heterogenous culture of the turn of the century was shaped not only by its famous literary prose, but also by theater and science and, crucially, by the science of theater—a fin-de-siècle complex of theatrical ideas and practices that was closely connected to discoveries in science and technology. The dissertation then delves into Anton Chekhov’s theatrical explorations of medical science. It situates Chekhov’s poetics within the larger context of contemporary medical sciences and argues that the writer turned to theater to explore medicine’s limited reach and selective applications. In theater, he could study socio-economically and psychologically marginalized “patients” and offer new insights on how to treat them. I then proceed to examine the science of education and Leo Tolstoy’s aesthetic explorations of it. Tolstoy’s lifelong interest in pedagogy and his ambivalence about moral upbringing mapped perfectly onto theater’s educational potential. Theater, I maintain, offered the writer a platform to explore these interests and to further extend the pedagogical reach of his prose. Finally, I address Maksim Gorky’s dramatic critique of contemporary industrial and technological developments. In his plays, workers and the various outcasts of industrialism could make a bodily claim for participation in the industrializing economy and thereby re-envision themselves as rightful members of Russia’s technological and industrial modernity. Through these case studies, this dissertation maintains that Chekhov’s, Tolstoy’s, and Gorky’s dramatic experiments fed on, assimilated, and ultimately challenged the newest scientific insights of the time, laying bare both the biases of the scientific method and the limitations of literary prose. Examining the dramatic turn of these writers, this dissertation paints fin-de-siècle culture as multi-faceted, heterogenous, and complex. Russia’s modern culture, I maintain, encompassed diverse and often contradictory forces, drew on radically different domains of knowledge, and moved freely between science and the arts—all the while methodically interrogating the line between them.
Recommended Citation
Mutc, Valeriia, "The Dramatic Turn: Science, Theater, and Russian Literature at the End of the Nineteenth Century" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1161.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1161
