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Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy offers a radical redefinition of Realism as a historical phenomenon, grounded in the literary manifestoes of the 1840s in three national literary canons (English, French and Russian) which issue a call to writers to record the manners and mores of their societies for posterity and thus to become "local historians." The sketch of manners becomes the instituting genre of Realism but is transformed in the major novels of the Realists into history as genealogy and into a phenomenology of modern subjectivity. Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy are brought into relation with Dostoevsky via a shared poetics as well as through a deconstructive and/or psychoanalytic analysis of their respective novels, which are interpreted in the context of various doctrines of Beauty, including Dostoevsky's own artistic credo of 1860. In this broad context of European aesthetics and the European literary canon, Dostoevsky's own view of history is illuminated in a new perspective, in which his concept of the "soil" is stripped of its conservative mask behind which emerges a (post-exile) Dostoevsky with socialist, pan-European views. The portrait of Dostoevsky which thus emerges from the present study is that of a European writer with a radically modern aesthetics and with a progressivist political orientation which is in consonance with his pre-exile affiliation with utopian socialism.
List of contents
List of Illustrations - Acknowledgements - Introduction: Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy - Manifestoes of Realism and the Sketch of Manners: Capturing a Moment in Time - Dostoevsky's Doctrine of Beauty as Desire of the Age - Dostoevsky's "Pochva" ["Soil"] and the 'Genealogy' of Russian History in The Possessed - Polyphony and the Gaze in Phenomenology - Sexuality, (Un-)Reason and Goliadkin as Kant's Subject of Taste - Dickens the Painter of Modern Life and the Unconscious - Flaubert and the Sketch of Manners - Tolstoy's Mikhailov, the Painter of Modern Life - The "Accidental Family" and Wittgenstein's 'Familienähnlichkeiten' - Bibliography - Index.
About the author
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover is Adjunct Associate Professor (Research) in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). She taught in Monash¿s Slavic Studies and the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies until 2013. Apart from Dostoevsky, her research is in the poetics of Modernism and Postmodernism in Russian and Slavic literatures, in the context of European phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory. She is a co-author of Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (1999 and 2016) with Mikhail Epstein and Alexander Genis. She is on the executive boards of the Australasian Association for Communist and Post-communist Studies (AACPCS) and the North American Serbian Studies Society (NASSS) and is regional representative for Australia of the International Dostoevsky Society (IDS). She is chief editor of The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review.
Summary
Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy offers a radical redefinition of Realism as a historical phenomenon, arguing that the sketch of manners becomes the instituting genre of Realism.
