ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“Kliger’s groundbreaking study sets a new standard for theoretically and philosophically grounded investigations of Russian realism. Kliger traces the outlines of realist literature—or, to use a nineteenth-century term, poetry of reality—as a sphere of writing and imagination where down-to-earth depictions of everyday existence are permeated by political reflection on such categories as sovereignty and civil society. Kliger’s framework will be productive not only for future studies of Russian realism but also for an inquiry into the roots of Russia’s persistent culture of despotism and the emancipatory movements that have opposed it.”

— Kirill Ospovat, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“In this both sweeping and subtle book Kliger returns to the terrain of nineteenth-century fiction to situate the Russian tradition alongside and against the European. Haunting the classical Russian novel, Kliger argues, was a distinct social imaginary closer in spirit to Greek tragedy than to modern fiction, one in which the force of sovereign power served to shatter or remake the individual or social body. Familiar to most of us as Europe’s brilliant if tardy cousin whose cultural development was forever stymied by the looming presence of autocracy, Russian literature is rediscovered here in its new function: to make the state, and the state of exception, visible, not only on the explicitly mimetic level, but allegorically, as the hidden motor of plots apparently remote from the realm of politics.”

— Harsha Ram, University of California, Berkeley

"Sovereign Fictions explores the intricate relationship between the socio-political environment of nineteenth-century Russia and Russian realism, emphasizing its distinctiveness, characterized by a ‘social imaginary’ deeply intertwined with the state’s dominance."

— Slavonic and East European Review

“Sovereign Fictions redefines our understanding of the way Russian realism developed and will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on the field.”

— Katherine Bowers, Slavic Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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