Road, River, and Book : the Russian Literary Underworld

UBC Lectures, Seminars, and Symposia

Road, River, and Book : the Russian Literary Underworld Henry, Barbara

Description

The Russian literary descent or katabasis takes three distinct forms: the folkloric distant journey, the classical voyage over water, and the Romantic “found manuscript.” Unlike the vertically-organized underworld of western European literature, the lateral orientation of the Russian katabasis reflects both native geography and a psychic ideal that levels social and economic hierarchies. This talk looks at how Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1862) unifies this tri-partite model. Unlike the inwardly-directed, centripetal emphases of the European descent, the transformations effected in the “dead house” are centrifugal, radiating outwards to echo the colossal changes effected by the 1861 Emancipation of the Serfs.

Item Metadata

Title	Road, River, and Book : the Russian Literary Underworld
Creator	Henry, Barbara
Contributor	University of British Columbia. Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies
Date Issued	2021-01-26
Description	The Russian literary descent or katabasis takes three distinct forms: the folkloric distant journey, the classical voyage over water, and the Romantic “found manuscript.” Unlike the vertically-organized underworld of western European literature, the lateral orientation of the Russian katabasis reflects both native geography and a psychic ideal that levels social and economic hierarchies. This talk looks at how Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1862) unifies this tri-partite model. Unlike the inwardly-directed, centripetal emphases of the European descent, the transformations effected in the “dead house” are centrifugal, radiating outwards to echo the colossal changes effected by the 1861 Emancipation of the Serfs.
Subject	Russian literature; katabasis; Dostoevsky; underworld; comparative literature
Type	Sound; Moving Image
Language	eng
Series	Sawchen lecture series
Date Available	2021-02-02
Provider	Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Rights	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
DOI	10.14288/1.0395805
URI	http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77234
Affiliation	Non UBC
Peer Review Status	Unreviewed
Scholarly Level	Faculty
Rights URI	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Aggregated Source Repository	DSpace

Item Media

Henry_Barbara_Road_river_2021.mp4 -- 942.73MB

Henry_Barbara_Road_river_2021.mp3 -- 99.94MB

Item Citations and Data

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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