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Writing the Time of Troubles traces recurring fictional representations of the man who briefly reigned as Tsar Dmitry, showing how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian playwrights and novelists reshaped and appropriated his equivocal career as a means of drawing attention to and negotiating the social anxieties of their own times.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation, Transliteration, Names, and AbbreviationsIntroduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry
Chapter 1. Prelude
Chapter 2. Two Visions of Tyranny: The Late Eighteenth Century
Chapter 3. Verbal Self-Fashioning: The Early Nineteenth Century
Chapter 4. Two Visions of Reform: 1866
Chapter 5. Contingent Self-Fashioning: The Fin de Siècle
Dmitry: Re-resurrection and Conclusions
Sources Cited
About the author
Marcia A. Morris is Professor of Slavic Languages at Georgetown University. She is the author of
Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature, The Literature of Roguery in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Russia and
Russian Tales of Demonic Possession: Translations of Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia.
Summary
Traces the proliferation of fictional representations of Tsar Dmitry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, showing how playwrights and novelists reshaped and appropriated his brief and equivocal career as a means of drawing attention to and negotiating the social anxieties of their own times.
Additional text
“In this well-wrought book, Marcia Morris discusses the ways
Russian writers have used the figure of False Dmitry to pose political,
existential, and literary questions. … Morris argues that each writer’s approach
to these questions expresses his relation to contemporaneous events as well as
his view of the distant past. The argument is framed by narrative theory and
trauma studies, and firmly grounded in studies of Russian history and
literature—the footnotes alone provide a detailed map of the book’s argument. …
We owe Marcia Morris a debt of gratitude for reading, contextualizing, and
analyzing these works, including some that most of us would never encounter
otherwise. This book is well worth reading.” —Sarah Pratt, University of Southern
California, Russian Review Vol. 78,
No. 2
