Articles

Empire and the Intimate: Fictions of the Mind in Russian Prose, 1830–40s

Senina, Vera V.

This dissertation, situated at the crossroads of Russian literary history, postcolonial theory, and cognitive science, examines literary form as a location of political power and resistance. It investigates in a series of case studies – from the fiction writings of Aleksandr Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) and Nikolai Gogol, and the autofiction prose of Nadezhda Durova/Aleksandr Aleksandrov – how Russian prose practiced and resisted the institutional gaze during the formative period when it first took interest in narrating the intimate and the innermost. This project’s central inquiry is about the epistemological, cultural, and political significance of the diverse literary situations and transactions where knowledge of a mind, other or own, is asserted. As examples of such situations, this study considers fictional narratives of human psychologies and intimate histories, the writer’s creative exchanges with the reading public, and the experience of writing about one’s own self – liberating and heavily constrained at the same time.

My project raises questions of institutionalization of art, access to knowledge, and the place of the intimate in imperial rule, intervening in scholarly conversations about the relationship between Russian literature and empire. I argue that writing prose fiction about the innermost in the 1830s–40s was a salient political project, entwined with institutional power structures and participating in the imperial politics of knowledge. Categories of literary form, including genre, narrative mode, and relation to lived experience, provided a space for reflecting on how minds appeared in the cultural imagination, how literature participates in the official discourses of knowledge, and how creative resistance and self-determination can be practiced from within the institutional structure.