Photo of cover art for Nekrasova’s novel Kozha (Source: Moscvich Mag)
UNDER REVIEW
“Storytelling as Protest and Solidarity:
Nekrasova’s Novel Kozha”
In this article, I read award-winning Russian novelist Evgenia Nekrasova’s 2022 book Kozha alongside Shatema Threadcraft’s recent theorization of Toni Morrison’s vision of democracy. In doing so, I conceptualize the novel Kozha as a bold new site of both democratic and solidarity practice within the context of Russia under Putin’s regime. Nekrasova’s Kozha (translatable as “Skin” in English) is the first known novel in global literature to depict fictionalized experiences of Russian serfdom and American slavery side-by-side. More than this, however, I position Nekrasova’s novel as diverging sharply and productively from 20th-century Russophone and Soviet solidarity projects via-a-vis Black Americans and their fight against racism and disenfranchisement. To make this claim, I draw on theories of “flesh,” “redress,” and “runagate” cultural practices made legible by Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Vincent Wimbush, and I marshal evidence from published interviews with Morrison and Nekrasova. Ultimately, I argue that Kozha serves not only as an explicitly political, canon-breaking event in terms of Russian literature’s historically absent genres of serf narratives and neo-serf narratives: Kozha also provides a provocative challenge to and bulwark against the highly racialized elements of contemporary Russia’s pro- and anti-regime protest cultures.
Portrait of Maria Nikolaevna Aksakova (Source: Marina Arkadevna)
UNDER REVIEW
“Sofias in the Russian Family Plot:
Denis Fonvizin’s The Minor and Beyond”
In this chapter contribution to an edited volume, I offer a genealogical reconstruction of the links between “mirror for princes” literature of antiquity and the sentimental family plots of 18th-century literature. I argue that the family novel is heir to a deeply philosophical tradition of wisdom literature that, in the West, begins with Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Then, I use the Russian family novel in particular to demonstrate how the 19th-century family novel served as the modern, liberal instantiation of earlier Western wisdom literature traditions.
This article highlights:
a distinction between ancient wisdom literature aimed at shaping sovereign rule and early liberal wisdom literature aimed at guiding civil society’s self-fashioning and self-rule;
a Homeric mirror tradition from Hobbes and Rousseau, to Fenelon and de Stael that influenced development of the Russian family novel;
the character of Sofia in the Russian family plots (starting with Denis Fonvizin’s famous play and echoing in the novels of Aksakov, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev) that both link the genre to the Homeric mirror tradition and provides political commentary on the desirabilty of liberal self-rule.
