Show simple item record

dc.contributor.advisorTodd, William M.
dc.contributor.advisorBuckler, Julie
dc.contributor.advisorO'Neill-Uzgiris, Kelly
dc.contributor.authorGroce, Alexander Marlen
dc.date.accessioned2019-05-20T10:23:23Z
dc.date.created2017-05
dc.date.issued2017-05-12
dc.date.submitted2017
dc.identifier.urihttp://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40046480*
dc.description.abstractAfter Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol’, and others problematized the bureaucrat in the 1820s and 1830s, the literary bureaucrat’s further contours were determined in no small part by the literary contributions of bureaucrats themselves. During the tumultuous period of reaction and reform between the 1830s and early 1870s the bureaucrat as a cultural type became a primary object of contestation between ideologies and literary schools. Investigating the strategies of literary texts authored by bureaucrats, I give special attention to representatives of the bureaucracy who were active in literature in the middle of the nineteenth-century. I examine the correspondence and private writing that lay bare the compounded difficulties of hiding literary pursuits hidden in plain sight of the censorship authorities. Depictions of the bureaucrat evolved in ways that, I suggest, are integrally related to the politics of the Reform Era in Russia and represent an attempt to reimagine the bureaucrat as a potential agent of civic renewal, a project that ultimately failed. I explore the evolving literary image of the bureaucrat in the era following the initial euphoria of the Great Reforms, when the pendulum began to swing back towards the familiar reactionary atmosphere that had inspired earlier representations. I identify the strategies employed by authors working in the censorship division in order to meet the demands of their bureaucratic profession while continuing to write literature. Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin in his early cycle “Provincial Sketches” and in his later novel “The Tashkenters’ Clique” offers a particularly illuminating case study. The “bureaucrat” constitutes a more unified ele-=ment in nineteenth-century Russian literary production than has heretofore been acknowledged. I conclude by proposing a new definition for this seemingly familiar Russian literary trope.
dc.description.sponsorshipSlavic Languages and Literatures
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.language.isoen
dash.licenseLAA
dc.subjectLiterature, Slavic and East European
dc.title"The Tsar's Scriveners": Writing Bureaucrats in Nineteenth-Century Russia
dc.typeThesis or Dissertation
dash.depositing.authorGroce, Alexander Marlen
dc.date.available2019-05-20T10:23:23Z
thesis.degree.date2017
thesis.degree.grantorGraduate School of Arts & Sciences
thesis.degree.levelDoctoral
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy
dc.type.materialtext
thesis.degree.departmentSlavic Languages and Literatures
dash.identifier.vireohttp://etds.lib.harvard.edu/gsas/admin/view/1553
dc.description.keywordsbureaucracy; censorship; imperial Russia; Saltykov; Saltykov-Shchedrin; chinovnik; Russia; prose; Pushkin; Gogol'; Herzen
dash.author.emailamgroce@gmail.com


Files in this item

Thumbnail

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record