Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by FAS Department "Slavic Languages and Literatures"
Now showing items 1-15 of 15
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Boundary Issues in Three Twentieth-Century Russian Poets (Mandelstam, Aronzon, Shvarts)
(2019-01-07)This dissertation examines works by three twentieth-century Russian poets in which the construction, dismantling, crossing, and blurring of boundaries plays an important role. Boundaries are understood in a variety of ... -
Detki v kletke: The Childlike Aesthetic in Soviet Children's Literature and Unofficial Poetry
(2016-05-18)Since its inception in 1918, Soviet children’s literature was acclaimed as innovative and exciting, often in contrast to other official Soviet literary production. Indeed, avant-garde artists worked in this genre for the ... -
Held Captive: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Aesthetics of Constraint
(2016-05-17)This dissertation examines a counterintuitive artistic imperative that emerged from the struggles of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov with an aesthetic problem of Kantian provenance. These two authors are widely considered ... -
“I Whisper Into the Radio Ear”: Radio Sound and Russian Modernist Poetics
(2016-09-12)In 1924, the Soviet “electrification” was followed by “radiofication,” a gradual introduction of broadcast radio that led to novel forms of newscasts, political propaganda, and creative formats. This dissertation is the ... -
Il Paradosso Dello Spirito Russo: Piero Gobetti and the Genius of Liberal Revolution
(2016-05-17)This dissertation examines Piero Gobetti’s activity as a student of Russian language and culture, and proposes that it be understood as a formative phase in a larger process of self-construction, through which Gobetti ... -
Khronika: Soviet Newsreel at the Dawn of the Information Age
(2012-10-31)This dissertation considers ten years in the life of one word. Between 1918 and 1928, khronika—the Russian word that describes newsreel filmmaking—became the site of extensive debates about the aesthetics and social ... -
Multivalent Russian Medievalism: Old Russia Through New Eyes
(2016-05-12)This thesis explores representations of medieval Russia in cultural and artistic works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an eye to the shifting perceptions of Russia’s cultural heritage demonstrated ... -
The Reception of Horace in the Courses of Poetics at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy: 17th-First Half of the 18th Century
(2014-10-21)For the first time, the reception of the poetic legacy of the Latin poet Horace (65 B.C.-8 B.C.) in the poetics courses taught at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (17th-first half of the 18th century) has become the subject of a ... -
Rules of Disengagement: Author, Audience, and Experimentation in Ukrainian and Russian Literature of the 1970s and 1980s
(2015-09-23)Is there a direct correlation between the degree of an artist’s participation in ideologically defined discursive practices and the aesthetic value and expressive innovation of her or his work? How does the concept of the ... -
Russian Poetry in the Marketplace: 1800-1917, and Beyond
(2013-09-19)My dissertation explores ways in which poetic utterances actually do speak against the received idea of poetry as an atemporal and unearthly genre and subtly present their own social and economic agendas. I read the canonical ... -
The Soviet Political Photomontage of the 1920s. the Case of Gustav Klucis
(2016-05-20)The Soviet political photomontage, as a turn “from faktura to factography,” is sometimes viewed as a compromise that the constructivists had to make to meet the aesthetic and informational needs of their new audience, the ... -
"The Tsar's Scriveners": Writing Bureaucrats in Nineteenth-Century Russia
(2017-05-12)After 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 ... -
Three Easy Pieces: Tolstoy, Khlebnikov, Platonov and the Fragile Absolute of Russian Modernity
(2017-01-26)This dissertation shows how three Russian authors estranged and challenged the notion of human freedom as self-determination—the idea that meaningful self-authorship is possible in view of the finitude that every human ... -
Ubi Cogito, Ibi Sum: Paranoid Epistemology in Russian Fiction 1833-1907
(2013-08-12)This dissertation addresses two questions fundamental to Russian nineteenth-century intellectual history: 1) Why does literature about paranoid psychosis figure so centrally in the nineteenth-century canon? and 2) How did ... -
Writing Between the Lines: Formal Discontinuities in Autobiographies of Ukrainian Writers, 1890s-1940s
(2017-05-12)My dissertation treats life-writing in Ukrainian literature from the 1890s to the 1940s. These texts are often marked by radical discontinuities: temporal, stylistic, ideological, linguistic, etc. Autobiographies tempt ...