Participants

Discussion

This roundtable will explore the innovative approaches UK scholars are using to study and teach nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. Berman is working with a team of scholars and translators from around the world on restoring the legacy of the Khvoshchinskaya sisters. Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1821-89) was once among the most highly paid and respected authors in Russia, but like all nineteenth-century Russian women novelists she largely dropped from literary history during the Soviet period. Restoring her to the canon helps reshape our understanding of the “classic Russian novel” and the role of women writers in the literary market. Hudspith is co-editing with Sarah Young (UCL SSEES) a new Companion to Dostoevsky for Routledge. This timely volume takes account of the context of decolonization and diversification of Slavonic Studies and aims to respond to urgent questions of how to read Russian literature at a time when it has been co-opted by the Kremlin for its nationalist agenda and weaponized as an instrument of imperialism. It will set a new trajectory for Dostoevsky scholarship by prioritizing the decolonial, the marginal, the transnational and the ecological, drawing on a range of different methodologies. Stuhr-Rommereim will discuss the rewards and challenges of studying “minor” Russophone writers, and will suggest some broad theoretical frameworks for this approach. Literature written by marginalized subjects or in less widely read languages tends more often to be relegated to the status of "historical" rather than "literary" interest, a problem that has been addressed in other fields from feminist literary studies (Margaret Cohen) to postcolonial theorists’ engagement with the concept of world literature (Gayatri Spivak). Whitehead’s work is devoted to crime fiction written in the late imperial era, with a particular focus on female authors. Aleksandra Sokolova (1833-1914) and Kapitolina Nazar’eva (1847-1900) wrote in various genres but their crime fiction represents a crucial strand in this otherwise male-dominated genre. Whitehead will discuss her scholarship and also her impact project, ‘Lost Detectives’, in collaboration with author-artist Carol Adlam, which adapts forgotten works of nineteenth-century Russian crime fiction into new media. Finally, Vaysman’s work on restoring Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova)'s gender identification through analysing historic documents brings together cutting edge methods of trans narratology and intermedial reception studies.