The Ethical Pact in Russophone Wartime Writing (1920-2009)
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Slavic Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
Bojanowska, Edyta
Abstract
Russophone war writing has a storied history. Writers have celebrated Russian war, resisted it, and have struggled to find words that adequately convey its experiences. Many wrote themselves into the gray area between celebration and resistance, a space where ethical issues are most visible and are most intricately confronted by writers. This dissertation analyzes the narrative ethics of Soviet and post-Soviet literature written from the first-person perspective that responded to wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. To describe the ethical relations that exist between readers, writers, and texts, I have developed a theoretical tool that I call the ethical pact. Ethical pacts are textual ethics mediated by genre, form, and discourse. They arise from expectations that readers hold of particular genres, narrative forms, or writers, and can be broken when a reader encounters a set of ethics that opposes their expectations of a text. I pay particular attention to such moments of slippage and transformation.I argue that ethical pacts frame the relationship between Russophone war writing and militarism beyond binary assessments of guilt or culpability. These ethical pacts show how authors and their readers navigate war’s ethically troubling events in dialogue with genres, conventions, and other sources that generate expectations for how war should be represented in literature. Expressed in a variety of ways, the relationship between literature and war extends beyond the printed page. When readers respond to the ethical dimensions of texts in public and private spaces, whether in courtrooms, journals, or in letters, it becomes clear that the ethical dimensions of narrative impact the lives of real people. Similarly, when writers represent historical wars, they are choosing how to transform the lived experiences of war into narrative, knowing that their texts will be read by people who were and continue to be affected by the consequences of war. My study reveals that narrative ethics is crucial for understanding the often-contradictory claims made by writers who represent violent conflict. Such claims often become apparent when a writer desires to publish their work through official publishing houses and journals, but cannot reconcile their personal ethics with those embodied by state power. Through the lens of the ethical pact, I analyze four Russophone writers whose texts capture such ethical complexities of representing war: the work of Isaac Babel, Anatoly Kuznetsov, Svetlana Aleksievich, and Olga Allenova. Each case study demonstrates how writers throughout various historical moments used narrative to express ethical resistance to state militarism, even as they relied on the state’s social and professional infrastructures for the dissemination of their work. I demonstrate that this phenomenon cannot be siloed into the Soviet period, but that, despite the political discontinuities between the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, it persists in present-day Russophone wartime writing. While this study is situated within the context of Russophone war writing, it develops a theoretical framework that shows how ethical relationships arise and operate between writers and readers, and offers the ethical pact as a narratological tool that can be used across different media and cultural contexts.
Recommended Citation
Small, Spencer Philip, "The Ethical Pact in Russophone Wartime Writing (1920-2009)" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1399.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1399
