A01=Ilya Kliger
A01=Professor Ilya Kliger
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Author_Ilya Kliger
Author_Professor Ilya Kliger
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSB
civil society
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realist fiction
Russian realism
social hermeneutic
social imaginary
softlaunch
sovereignty
the novel
the state
Product details
- ISBN 9780226831879
- Weight: 399g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Apr 2024
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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An exploration of Russian realist fiction reveals a preoccupation with the absolutist state.
The nineteenth-century novel is generally assumed to owe its basic social imaginaries to the ideologies, institutions, and practices of modern civil society. In Sovereign Fictions, Ilya Kliger asks what happens to the novel when its fundamental sociohistorical orientation is, as in the case of Russian realism, toward the state. Kliger explores Russian realism’s distinctive construals of sociality through a broad range of texts from the 1830s to the 1870s, including major works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Goncharov, and Turgenev, and several lesser-known but influential books of the period, including Alexander Druzhinin’s Polinka Saks (1847), Aleksei Pisemsky’s One Thousand Souls (1858), and Vasily Sleptsov’s Hard Times (1865). Challenging much current scholarly consensus about the social dynamics of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Sovereign Fictions offers an important intervention in socially inflected theories of the novel and in current thinking on representations of power and historical poetics.
The nineteenth-century novel is generally assumed to owe its basic social imaginaries to the ideologies, institutions, and practices of modern civil society. In Sovereign Fictions, Ilya Kliger asks what happens to the novel when its fundamental sociohistorical orientation is, as in the case of Russian realism, toward the state. Kliger explores Russian realism’s distinctive construals of sociality through a broad range of texts from the 1830s to the 1870s, including major works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Goncharov, and Turgenev, and several lesser-known but influential books of the period, including Alexander Druzhinin’s Polinka Saks (1847), Aleksei Pisemsky’s One Thousand Souls (1858), and Vasily Sleptsov’s Hard Times (1865). Challenging much current scholarly consensus about the social dynamics of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Sovereign Fictions offers an important intervention in socially inflected theories of the novel and in current thinking on representations of power and historical poetics.
Ilya Kliger is associate professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University, where he is also director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies. Kliger is the author of The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern European Literature and the coeditor of Persistent Forms: Practicing Historical Poetics.
