The Problem of Continuity of the Russian Novel

Defining the “origins of the Russian novel” presents a continuing challenge to scholars and in part reflects the larger crisis of Russian identity in the early 19th century and the perceived sharp break with the earlier literary tradition. The present study attempts to bridge this gap by exploring the roots of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin in eighteenth-century literary traditions. It will apply Bakhtin’s notion of a literary counter-tradition, “a special realm” of “parodic doubles and laughing reflections of the direct word” to reconstitute the “prehistory of novelistic discourse” in Russia.
Marcus C. Levitt is Professor of Russian at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His books include Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (1989); Early Modern Russian Letters (2009); and The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia (2011), which earned the 18th Century Russian Studies Association Marc Raeff Book Prize and a Phi Kappa Phi Award. He has co-edited Eros and Pornography in Russian Culture (1999) and Times of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture (2007), and has translated major works by V. Zhivov, B. Uspensky and A. Zorin. In 2013, USC awarded him its highest honor, a Raubenheimer Award, “for outstanding contributions in teaching, research, and service.” Moderation: Professor Dr. Ulrike Jekutsch