Table of Contents

Introduction: the fin-de-siècle mood in Russian literature Ani Kokobobo and Katherine Bowers; 1. The Russian Rougon-Macquart: degeneration and biological determinism in The Golovlev Family Kate Holland; 2. The hiding places of the self in Dostoevsky's Adolescent Yuri Corrigan; 3. A childhood's garden of despair: Dostoevsky and 'The Boy at Christ's Christmas Party' Robin Feuer Miller; 4. The railway and the elemental force: Slavophilism, Pan-Slavism, and apocalyptic anxieties in Anna Karenina Alexander Burry and S. Ceilidh Orr; 5. 'Mister Russian Beast': civilization's discontents in Turgenev Emma Lieber; 6. Masculine degeneration in Dostoevsky's Demons Connor Doak; 7. The burden of superfluity: reconsidering female heroism in Chekhov's The Seagull Jenny Kaminer; 8. The fall of the house: Gothic narrative and the decline of the Russian family Katherine Bowers; 9. Corpses of desire and convention: Tolstoy's and Artsybashev's grotesque realism Ani Kokobobo; 10. The little man in the overcoat: Gogol and Krzhizhanovsky Muireann Maguire; 11. Icons, eclipses and stepping off the train: Vladimir Korolenko and the Ocherk Jane Costlow; 12. Decadent ecosystems in Uncle Vanya: a chorographic meditation Thomas Newlin; 13. The mute body: Leonid Andreev's abject realism Edith W. Clowes; 14. The thinking oyster: Turgenev's 'Drama of Dying' as the decay of Russian realism Ilya Vinitsky; 15. An afterword on the potential of ends Caryl Emerson; Bibliography.

Promotional Information

An essay collection that explores Russian literature and culture in relation to the late nineteenth-century fin de siècle.

About the Author

Katherine Bowers is a Research Associate in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and holds a Research Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge. Ani Kokobobo is an Assistant Professor in the Slavic Department at the University of Kansas, where she received a Hall Center for the Humanities fellowship.