Poverty of the Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature About the Poor (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory)

The primal scene of all nineteenth-century western thought might involve an observer gazing at someone poor, most commonly on the streets of a great metropolis, and wondering what the spectacle meant in human, moral, political, and metaphysical terms. For Russia, most of whose people hovered near the poverty line throughout history, the scene is one of special significance, presenting a plethora of questions and possibilities for writers who wished to depict the spiritual and material reality of Russian life. How these writers responded, and what their portrayal of poverty reveals and articulates about core values of Russian culture, is the subject of this book, which offers a compelling look into the peculiar convergence in nineteenth-century Russian literature of ideas about the poor and about the processes of art. David Herman begins with Karamzin's "Poor Liza," the immensely popular inaugurator of the tradition of Russian fictional works about the poor and the best known example of Russian sentimentalism. He then considers Pushkin's "Egyptian Nights"; Gogol's "Overcoat," Petersburg tales, and Selected Passages; and Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the 1880 "Pushkin speech." Among these texts, which provide an almost bewilderingly wide range of views on the identity of the poor, Herman sorts out the various values at play, not only in depictions of the poor as characters, but in the character of the narratives themselves. As prominently as poverty figures in Russian literature, this is the first sustained analysis of its literary, conceptual, and cultural implications. As such, it deepens our understanding and appreciation of some of the most widely read literature of all time.Herman, David is the author of 'Poverty of the Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature About the Poor (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory)' with ISBN 9780810116924 and ISBN 0810116928.