Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century

Ingrid Kleespies is Associate Professor of Russian Studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Florida. She is the author of A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature (2012) and of articles on eighteenth and nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture, with a special focus on Russian Romanticism, travel literature, and symbolic spaces.Lyudmila Parts is Professor of Russian at McGill University (Montreal). She is the author of In Search of the True Russia. The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist Discourse (2018); The Chekhovian Intertext: Dialogue with a Classic (2008); and the editor of The Russian 20th Century Short Story: A Critical Companion (2009). She has published articles on Karamzin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, contemporary authors, symbolic geography, and Russian travelogue.

“The Ivan Goncharov that emerges from the pages of this collection is one of the most modern of nineteenth-century Russian writers. … Goncharov for the Twenty-First Century offers a wealth of new ways to think about his literary legacy. … The overall result is an exciting, wide-ranging, and valuable collection.” — Vadim Shneyder, The Russian Review“The editors of this attractive volume stress their desire to distance the study of Ivan Goncharov from a ‘conventional psychological, Freudian approach’ (p. xiv), while escaping the ‘unquestioned dominance of Oblomov’ (ibid.) in the author’s oeuvre. Laudable yet complicated aims. … Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century is to be praised for its ambition and its work of contextualization and expansion. It rouses readers of Goncharov from the comfortable divan of tradition on which, in our dressing-gown-clad idleness, we might prefer to subside.”— James Womack, University of Cambridge, Modern Language Review (Vol. 118, No. 1)“Goncharov in the Twenty-First Century is a much-needed reassessment of this classic Russian writer and our understanding of his place in the canon. Bringing together work by Russian and Western scholars, it allows us to see Goncharov through a variety of contemporary theoretical lenses (such as queer theory and postcolonial studies) while also shedding new light on the writer’s historical moment and how it shaped his career (for example in the interplay between Goncharov’s art and his work as a state servitor and censor). The volume promises to open up significant avenues of research for a new generation of international scholarship on this key figure.”—Anne Lounsbery, Department Chair, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University“This volume brings together an international group of outstanding scholars to explore the work of Ivan Goncharov from a wide range of contemporary methodological perspectives. Genre criticism, post-colonial and queer theory, theories of fictionality, literary-institutional and philosophical approaches—all are brilliantly represented in their application to the work of one of the most intriguing literary figures of the age of Russian realism. Goncharov appears to us here not only as a novelist, but as a civil servant, a censor, an author of a travelogue, a memoirist, and a literary critic. The book gives us Goncharov as an author who continues to provoke methodological questions and to open new areas of critical exploration.”—Ilya Kliger, Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University“The go-to volume in English for new approaches to Goncharov, this important book significantly reevaluates his life, work, and thought. These ten articles reframe the classic Oblomov, unify Goncharov’s novelistic trilogy, bring into focus The Precipice and The Frigate Pallada, and probe his career as public servant and censor. Goncharov emerges with surprising force here as a thinker engaged with the challenges of modernity and reflecting on historical and cultural legacies of the past. We learn how varieties of reserve, resistance and desire shape his artistic and existential choices as he negotiates contemporary social, professional and literary pressures, and how both his professional and literary careers were mangled in the jaws of the 1860s. While Goncharov’s contemporaries often poorly understood the significance of his work and saw it as outmoded, this volume identifies multiple currents in it that pull deeply towards the future and illuminates Goncharov as a quiet prophet of unconventionality.”—Sara Dickinson, Associate Professor of Russian Literature and Culture, University of Genoa

• Table of ContentsContributorsNote on Transliteration and Translation AcknowledgementsIntroduction Ingrid Kleespies and Lyudmila PartsPart One. The Life of ServiceWriter and Chinovnik: The Case of I. A. GoncharovSergei Gus′kovWriter or Censor: I. A. Goncharov’s Service in the Departments of Censorship, and the Evolution of Professional Ethics for Censors and Writers in Russia, in the 1850s and 1860sKirill Zubkov Part Two. The Challenges of Philosophy“Oblomovskii Platon”: Platonic Subtexts in OblomovVladimir IvantsovHegel’s Philosophy of History as the Unifying Thread of Goncharov’s TrilogyVictoria JuharyanLonging, Replacement, and Anti-Economy in Goncharov’s OblomovSonja KoroliovPart Three. The Challenges of Realism: Traditions and Transgressions“Shadows, Dead People, and Specters”: Gothic Aesthetics in Ivan Goncharov’s The PrecipiceValeria SobolThe Queer Nihilist—Queer Time, Social Refusal, and Heteronormativity in Goncharov's The PrecipiceAni Kokobobo and Devin McFaddenPart Four. Author and Imperialist Abroad: Frigate Pallada“I Avoided the Factual Side . . .”: Fiction and Document in Frigate PalladaAleksei BalakinA Russian Observer Catches the London Eye: Envisioning Imperial Modernity in Goncharov’s Frigate PalladaIngrid KleespiesWho are You Laughing at? Identity, Laughter, and Colonial Discourse in Goncharov’s Frigate PalladaLyudmila PartsWorks CitedIndex