Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Slavic Languages and Literatures

First Advisor

Brunson, Molly

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the elaboration of Russian racial imaginaries was coterminous with the construction of the Russian literary canon and Russian literary theory. Beginning with the global debates concerning the abolition of slavery and serfdom in the 1850s and concluding with the first wave of emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the dissertation demonstrates how canonical Russian authors—Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Viktor Shklovsky, and others—wrote fiction that, in mobilizing the racial implications of intimacy, kinship, and heredity, articulated arguments about racial difference and the conceptual “fit” of “race” for the Russian Empire. Literary authors make arguments about Russianness as a racial category, in the three ensuing chapters respectively, by narrating class reconciliation during serfdom, claiming Russian hybridity as imperial rationale, and evoking Russian abjection in emigration. I show how Russian writers have endowed aesthetic modes—the marriage plot, the novel, defamiliarization—with arguments about bodily difference. The project hinges on the trope of “form,” which unites literary theory (the idea that literary texts are embodied, that they can be “loose baggy monsters” or “hybrid”) and theories of racial and sexual difference in humans. The Russian canon is formed through a series of arguments, some internal to the literary works and some external, about the exceptionalness of Russian forms. The first chapter proposes that Russian noblemen authors in the 1850s wrote cross-class marriage plots that attempted to narrate the Russian peasantry out of bondage, which they associated with Blackness, and into whiteness. The second chapter shows how Fyodor Dostoevsky, by narrating Russian women as racially “hybrid,” a potential mix of Slavic, Jewish, and Romani, metonymized the multi-ethnic Russian Empire in the individual gendered body; I also indicate the racial logic undergirding critical commonplaces about Dostoevsky’s dialogism and generic hybridity. In the third chapter, I argue that this imbrication of literary production and racial theorizing comes to a head in Russian Formalism, as Viktor Shklovsky and Elsa Triolet define the Russian literary author with reference to Black and Asian subjects, and particularly the “Tahiti” topos. Ultimately, this project aims to revise two conventional narratives in Russian studies: first, that Russia is divorced from Western racial formations, ripe for comparative study but less so for claims about continuity with historical or cultural phenomena elsewhere; second, that Russian literature is an articulation of a universal, rather than nationalist or racializing, humanism. Because Russia is often assumed not to have a racial imaginary—to be outside Western ideas of “whiteness” or “Blackness,” somewhere “between East and West”—the study of its particular racial formations, and its continuity with Western ones, is crucial for both Slavic and Eurasian Studies and disciplines beyond it. This dissertation presents the Russian Empire, and its literature, as a key site for theorizing the history of sexuality and racial formations.

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