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Dostoevsky at ASEEES 2018!

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This year, ASEEES is holding its 50th annual convention and celebrating 70 years since its founding. Dostoevsky scholarship remains a crucial part of scholarship in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies, as the following list attests. Once again, the convention offers a rich selection of panels, roundtables, and individual presentations on Dostoevsky’s works and thought. The list below is divided into two parts: Part I features panels and roundtables that focus primarily on Dostoevsky; Part II lists panels and roundtables where Dostoevsky features prominently in at least one presentation. We hope you can join us in Boston to hear about the fruits of another year’s work on Dostoevsky!

Panels with a Principal Focus on Dostoevsky

Thursday, December 6

Perversity in Dostoevsky

Thu, December 6, 2:00 to 3:45pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I

Perversity is a central concept for Dostoevsky studies. It entails an internal dialogism – where a discourse is deliberately contradicted, subverted or mocked in the perverse act. A perverse discourse is thus parasitical as it depends on a host narrative to manipulate and transform. Perversity can often be an act of provocation and also goes hand-in-hand with performativity, as the deliberate desire for contrariness implies the presence of an audience one is being perverse for. There are thus natural connections in Dostoevsky between perversity, performativity, provocation and parasitism. The papers in this panel will explore this rich seam of ideas in Dostoevsky’s work, focusing largely on novels he wrote after his return from Siberian exile, but also, in one case, discussing it in the context of his polemically-inclined, journalistic writing. These papers will largely seek to build on Bakhtinian Dostoevsky, exploring the existential, epistemic and ethical consequences of radical dialogism and polyphony.

Papers: 

“Lebedev as Anti-Saint: A Study in Dostoevsky’s Negative Anthropology” – Denis Zhernokleyev, Vanderbilt University

“The Perverse Mysticism of Dostoevsky’s Westernizers” – Bilal Siddiqi, University College London

“The Imp of the Perverse and the Oxygen of Publicity” – Lynn E. Patyk, Dartmouth College

Discussant: Carol Apollonio, Duke University

 

Friday, December 7

Dostoevsky’s Unstable Narratives: Self, Narrators, Discourse, Form

Fri, December 7, 8:00 to 9:45am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I

This panel examines three of Dostoevsky’s works, with an eye towards narrative instability. The protagonists, narrators, spaces, discourses, and even the narrative structures of Dostoevsky’s works are distressingly unstable. Pervasive across his oeuvre is an acute sense of an unstable self, confronting the moral, spiritual, and historical disintegration occurring in 1860s and 1870s Russia. This emerges at the level of structure via conflicting discourses, unreliable narration, ambiguous information, and an impulse towards fragmentation both in perspective and form. Our interdisciplinary panel brings together psychology, narratology, discourse analysis, and sociology to shed light on the instability – of self, narrative, and reference – central to Dostoevsky’s poetics.

 

Papers:

“Dostoevsky’s Narrative Suicide Etiology: Egoistic, Altruistic, Anomic, and Fatalistic Paradigms” – Amy D. Ronner, St. Thomas University

“Problems of Narrative Irregularity in Dostoevsky’s Demons” – Kornelije Kvas, University of Belgrade

“Serving Dostoevsky: Myshkin as Servant and Counter-Narrator in The Idiot” – Inna Kapilevich, Columbia University

Discussant: Deborah A. Martinsen, Columbia University

 

Dostoevsky’s Podrostok (Roundtable)

Fri, December 7, 10:00 to 11:45am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I 

Dostoevsky’s critically neglected novel, The Adolescent [Podrostok] (1875), has long been considered an artistic failure. The scholars on this roundtable disagree. They argue, by contrast, that The Adolescent contains the keys to understanding Dostoevsky’s work as a whole. They will explore problems ranging from Dostoevsky’s reinvention of the bildungsroman genre, to Versilov’s changing role in the novel (from the notebooks to the final version); from the gender dynamics of speech and silence, to illegitimacy as a metaphor for Dostoevskian modes of characterization. By bringing a wide range of new interpretations and approaches into dialogue, this roundtable aims to spark new critical interest in The Adolescent, while treating it as a test case for mediating diverging approaches to and perspectives on Dostoevsky’s art.

Participants:

 Yuri Corrigan, Boston University

Kate Rowan Holland, University of Toronto

Chloë Kitzinger, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Chloe Simone Papadopoulos, Yale University

 

Dostoevsky in Space

Fri, December 7, 12:30 to 2:15pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I

This panel explores Dostoevsky’s engagement with and depiction of the built environment and the natural world. From the sensory to the imagined, from Siberian prisons, the streets of St. Petersburg, to the mountain of Switzerland, consideration of space in Dostoevsky’s work is essential. As the presentations on this panel show, a place as apparent and solid as Russia’s capital city may quickly give way to other ways of understanding and experiencing space in Dostoevsky.

Papers:

“The House on the Ditch with a Stairway to Heaven” – Katya Jordan, Brigham Young University

“Sacred Space in The Idiot: The Case of Alexandre Calame” – Amy Singleton Adams, College of the Holy Cross

“From Street Theatre to Dramatized Interiors: Performing Spaces in Crime and Punishment” – Sarah Jean Young, University College London

Discussant: Greta Nicole Matzner-Gore, University of Southern California

 

Saturday, December 8

Emotional and Physical Trauma in Dostoevsky

Sat, December 8, 3:30 to 5:15pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I 

Papers:

“A Comparison of Dostoevsky’s Reported Medical Trauma Resulting from his Imprisonment with Those of Fellow Survivors of the Dead House” – Elizabeth Ann Blake, St. Louis University

“Performative Victimhood: The Right to Be Unhappy in Dostoevsky’s Idiot” – Milica Ilicic, Columbia University

“Stavrogin, the 1840s and 1860s, and the Non-Euclidian and its Limits in Dostoevsky” – Maxwell Parlin, Princeton University

Discussant: Brian R. Johnson, Macalester College

 

Sunday, December 9

The North American Dostoevsky Society: New Readings in Economic Criticism

Sun, December 9, 8:00 to 9:45am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I

 These three papers offer stimulating new readings of economic factors in Dostoevsky’s novels, tightly embedding the theme in the writer’s complex poetics. The flow of money determines plot dynamics; conveys moral messages; throws characters of different social classes into connection and conflict; reflects rapidly changing realities in Russia during a time of economic and political reform; and undermines ostensibly neutral and rational systems of value by turning money into an artistic symbol fraught with danger. These readings offer a typology of economic elites in “The Idiot”; expose the speculator’s trading strategies in narrative in “The Adolescent”; and reveal money as the author’s most cherished generator of narrative interest over the sweep of his writing career.

Papers:

“Becoming a Rothschild: Trading Narratives in Podrostok” – Jonathan Paine, University of Oxford

“The Tie that Breaks: Money and Plot from Poor Folk to The Brothers Karamazov” – Jillian Porter, University of Colorado

“Forms of Money and Narrative Form in The Idiot” – Vadim Shneyder, University of California, Los Angeles

Discussant: William Mills Todd III, Harvard University

 

The Interaction of Science and Literature: The Case of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sun, December 9, 10:00 to 11:45am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I

Literary scholars have long explored the engagement between science and literature in the 19th century, not only on the level of theme but also through the shared use of metaphor, narrative structure, and plot. How do literature and science actually interact? Taking the example of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the panelists will trace different aspects of the novelist’s engagement with science at the time, focusing on the developments in Victorian physiological psychology, the adoption of Darwinian evolutionary plots and metaphors, the performance and spectacle of epileptic pathology, and Darwinian-inflected models for representing the workings of the brain.

Papers:

 “Mind and Material World: Dostoevsky and a Science of Realism” – Melissa Frazier, Sarah Lawrence College

“Performing Narratives of Illness: Dostoevsky’s Epileptics” – Brian R. Johnson, Macalester College

“Narrative and Science of the Brain: Dostoevsky’s Idiot” – Brian Egdorf, UC Berkeley

Discussant: Riccardo Nicolosi

 

Scripted Failures: Performance, Repetition, and Rupture in Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Experimental Theater

Sun, December 9, 12:00 to 1:45pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I

This panel seeks to examine performative failure and interrupted communication by discussing attempts to communicate through temporal aporias, linguistic breakdown and repetition. The papers focus on the works of Dostoevsky and Turgenev, both in their 19th century context, as well as through later 20th-21st century theatrical performances. Monika Greenleaf’s paper analyzes the role of stuttering and repetition in Turgenev’s “Month in the Country” and two works by Dostoevsky to show that the texts constitute experiments in performative failure and prescient break-throughs in theatrical form, which thematize interrupted communication and contribute to their own postponed performances. Irina Erman’s paper traces a link between the excessive use of diminutives and repetition in Dostoevsky’s “Poor Folk” to the decomposition of language in “Bobok” to examine both texts as performative experiments in communication through failure. Anna Muza’s paper explores the performative treatment of Dostoevsky’s extreme, desperate emotionality and incoherent or inarticulate states – hysteria, hallucination, terror, nadryv – in the staging of “The Brothers Karamazov” (1910) and “The Possessed” (Nikolai Stavrogin, 1913) by the Moscow Art Theater.

Papers:

“The Stutter of Time: Failed Plays and Postponed Performances” – Monika Greenleaf, Stanford University

“Diminution, Repetition, and Decomposition in Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk and ‘Bobok’” – Irina M. Erman, College of Charleston

“Ivan’s Nightmare, Hamlet’s Madness: The Performance of Rupture” – Anna Muza, UC Berkeley

Discussants:

Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Emory University

Alexander Mihailovic, Brown University

 

Panels Featuring One or More Papers on Dostoevsky

Thursday, December 6

Russian Fictional Responses to Darwin

Thu, December 6, 2:00 to 3:45pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 1st, Columbus II

Several scholars have gathered for a project on the Russian Reception of Darwin. The plan is to produce a collection of translations of the most important responses to Darwin to be followed by a volume of essays. Two panels are being proposed for ASEEES 2018 as part of the project. This first panel focuses on fictional responses to Darwin.

Papers:

“Beyond Social Darwinism: Positive Heroes’ Engagement with Science and Progress in Russian Conservative Novels of the 1860s-1870s” – Victoria Y. Thorstensson, Nazarbayev University

“Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and the Early Reception of Darwin in Russia: 1860-65” – James Frank Goodwin, University of Florida

“On Learned Neighbors and Philadelphia Naturalists: Mapping Chekhov’s Darwinist Parodies” – Melissa Lynn Miller, University of Notre Dame

Discussant: Yvonne Helen Howell, University of Richmond

 

The Performative Icons and the Arts

Thu, December 6, 2:00 to 3:45pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon D

The work of Alexei Lidov defines “spatial” icons – including churches, sanctuaries, and cities – in terms of their performativity, which forms and describes the perception of the space as sacred. Lidov and other scholars like Boris Uspensky, Bissera Pentcheva, and Marie Gasper-Hulvat approach the performativity of icons through three dimensionality and movement through space and through the materiality of icons themselves. But does our understanding of the performative icon change when it is encountered in literature rather than in a three-dimensional space? This panel considers the performative icon in the context of literature and representational arts of the nineteenth century, the workings of the literary icon, and the meaning of its performativity to the work(s) themselves.

Papers:

“Icon, Art, and Performance in the Works of Vsevolod Garshin” – Benjamin Jens, University of Arizona

“A Haymarket Khozhdenie na Osliati: Raskolnikov’s Donkey Walk and the Failure of Iconic Performativity” – Kathleen Scollins, University of Vermont

“How the Inmates’ Polyphonic Play in Dead House Performs the Nativity Icon” – Michael Mikailovitch Ossorgin VII, Fordham University

Discussant: Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, University of Wisconsin-Madison

 

Friday, December 7

Music and Theatricality in Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Kharms

Fri, December 7, 12:30 to 2:15pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 5th, Maine

Papers:

“The Unsung Melody: Performance Practice in The Eternal Husband” – Eva Troje, Princeton University

“Towards the Sacred Banks of the Nile: Allusions to Verdi in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, 1925” – David Gomiera Molina, University of Chicago

“Performing the Cupboard: Daniil Kharms and the Eroticisation of Opacity” – Mariia Semashyna, Central European University

Discussant: Emily Frey, Swarthmore College

 

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy Starting from Their Psychology

Fri, December 7, 4:30 to 6:15pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I

This panel looks at the ethical consequences of Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s visions of human psychology, with a view to bringing out the differences in their psychologies and ethics. Yet despite those differences, each writer’s vision of how people should live is not free-standing but depends on an anterior vision of how the human psyche is constructed. We therefore attempt to chart some of the connections between the shape of human nature and the shape of morality in the two bodies of fiction.

Papers:

“Whose Unconscious is it?: The Role of Dreamlike Experiences in Dostoevsky’s Existential Moral Psychology” – Evgenia Cherkasova, Suffolk University

“Nihilism as Refuge: Rethinking the Philosophical Dostoevsky” – Yuri Corrigan, Boston University

“Tolstoy’s Three Ethical Systems” – David M.B.L. Herman, University of Virginia

Discussant: Irina Paperno, University of California, Berkeley

 

Saturday, December 8

Russian Dialogues with Critical Theory: Adorno, Arendt, and Russia

Sat, December 8, 8:00 to 9:45am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Orleans

This panel explores affinities and points of dialogue between Russian culture and German philosophy of the twentieth century, building on the work of recent volumes such as Critical Theory in Russia and the West (BASEES/Routledge 2010) and Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford 2012). There has been a surge of interest in the philosophy of Hannah Ardent in Russia, where her ideas have emerged from the “zone of silence” in the Soviet Union to a central place in intellectual discourse today. Diana Gasparyan’s paper takes a key theme in the work of Arendt and the twentieth-century Russian-Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili–the relationship between thinking and ethics—and shows that in studying this relationship, both writers recognize the necessity of clarifying the social and political nature of the individual, and the distinctiveness of the citizen. Svetlana Klimova shows that both Tolstoy and Arendt were building on the foundation of Kant’s philosophical anthropology; this common heritage, she argues, led them to identify a fundamental failure of thinking and judgment in their societies. For both, Klimova argues, the struggle against the dictatorial state turns out to be a struggle for the “Kantian” individual, capable of overcoming external and internal evil through reason and the moral law. In his paper, Brian Armstrong brings Dostoevsky’s familiar concerns with beauty and its socio-historical potential into dialogue with the explorations of beauty, the sublime, and their potential for social change in modernity in the work of Adorno, and behind him, Kant.

Papers:

“Hannah Arendt and Merab Mamardashvili: On the Possibility of Political Judgement” – Diana Gasparyan, NRU Higher School of Economics

“The Philosophy of Evil in the Work of Lev Tolstoy and Hannah Arendt” – Svetlana Klimova, NRU Higher School of Economics

“Can Beauty Save the World?: Dostoevsky, Adorno, and the Challenges of the Beautiful and Sublime” – Brian Arthur Armstrong, Augusta University

Discussant: Susan McReynolds, Northwestern University

 

Rewriting the Russian Literary Canon in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Sat, December 8, 10:00 to 11:45am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 5th, Connecticut

This panel puts diverse twentieth-century reinterpretations of nineteenth-century Russian literature in dialogue with one another in order to rethink the canon. Elizabeth Geballe reads Constance Garnett’s English translations of Dostoevsky’s passages about corpses as a form of rewriting. She demonstrates how the translations help to theorize and expose poetics already at work in Dostoevsky. Erica Drennan examines mock trial versions of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment that were performed in the 1920s and compares them to the original novel. She reads these performative reinterpretations in order to interrogate the role of the reader and the relationship between dialogue and authority in Dostoevsky’s novel. Sophie Pinkham’s paper shifts the focus from Dostoevsky to Pushkin. She argues that the recent “canonization” of Sergei Dovlatov, particularly in relation to his connection with Pushkin’s estate, reveals post-Soviet efforts to establish a sense of cultural continuity across the centuries. By connecting these different readings and rewritings of Dostoevsky and Pushkin, this panel examines how nineteenth-century works were appropriated and transformed in the twentieth century, and considers how these reinterpretations of the canon affect our understanding of both nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature.

Papers: 

“Unwanted Afterlives: Translating Dostoevsky’s Corpses” – Elizabeth Frances Geballe, Indiana University, Bloomington

“Performing Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov on Trial” – Erica Stone Drennan, Columbia University

“Canonizing Dovlatov in Putin’s Russia” – Sophie Pinkham, Columbia University

Discussant: Milla (Lioudmila) Fedorova, Georgetown University

 

 

Cognitive Perspectives on Classic Russian Prose (Roundtable)

Sat, December 8, 10:00 to 11:45am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon I

Our roundtable will consider the bilateral study of Russian prose and cognitive science. On the one hand, recent discoveries in the functions of the mind point out how writers like Dostoevsky, Nabokov and Tolstaya exploit deep-set mental proclivities. On the other, sensitive readings of their prose works not only tests received science, they may also indicate directions for further clinical inquiry. Madelyn Stuart will apply blending theory and neurological memory work to Nabokov’s early short stories and novellas. Katherina B. Kokinova asks to what extent the collaboration of cognitive narratology and reception theory can unravel the mirroring cyclic recurrence of rereading and narrating in Nabokov’s “The Circle.” According to Amina Gabrielova, characters in Tatiana Tolstaya’s stories often make sense of the surrounding world by interpreting sounds, or by hearing; she will ponder the cognitive differences between visual and auditory perception. Examining the public circumstances of Raskolnikov’s confession in Crime and Punishment, Tom Dolack suggests that conscience conveys prosociality in individual consciousness. Looking at narrative innovations in that same Dostoevsky novel, Brett Cooke wonders what role classic prose plays in the development of our cognitive potential. Inasmuch as we will be discussing shared human capabilities, an important question for our ending discussion will be to what extent cognitive findings with one writer can be exported to the study of another.

Participants:

Brett Cooke, Texas A&M University

Tom Dolack, Wheaton College

Amina Gabrielova, Purdue University

Madelyn Stuart, University of Virginia

 

Crime, Punishment, and Bureaucracy: Dostoevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Early Russian Crime Fiction

Sat, December 8, 1:30 to 3:15pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 3rd, Arlington

Papers:

“Dostoevsky’s Adventure in the French Language (1880-1930)” – Svetlana Cecovic, NRU Higher School of Economics

“Bureaucratic Mythologies: Folktale as Critique in Gospoda Golovlevy” – Michaela Telfer, University of Southern California

“Performing Criminal Investigations: Scenes of Confrontation and Interrogation in Late Imperial Russian Crime Fiction” – Claire Whitehead, University of St. Andrews

Discussant: Irina Reyfman, Columbia University

 

Folklore and Performance

Sat, December 8, 1:30 to 3:15pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 4th, Grand Ballroom Salon A

The three papers in this panel pose questions about performative folk genres in Russian literature and culture: songs and food. Oxana Vorobyova’s “The Study of Folklore in the “Russkoe slovo” Magazine: Performing Identity” presents fragments of folklore, found in different materials of the “Russkoe slovo” magazine, for example, the sad folk song “Na gore-gore tatar’yo stoit.” The author aims to determine the region, approximate time of origin, and the performer of fragments of folklore by context. In “Enacting the Folk Song in Dostoevsky’s “Akulka’s Husband:” Comic and Tragic Texts,” Cecilia Dilworth argues that the pattern of a comic folk song about cuckoldry is grafted onto the events related, skewering the perception of actors, narrator and audience, and moving the story towards its catastrophic conclusion. She notes that “Akulka’s Husband” also analyzes how draws on a different, tragic folkloric genre – the Russian folk ballad—and that piecing together motifs from a number of classic ballad plots centered on the act of wife murder, Dostoevsky creates a “ballad in prose.” She analyzes how comic and tragic trajectories of the two genres intersect and clash, the former partly functioning as a catalyst for the latter. In her paper, “Ritual, Recipe, Representation (or From Ritual to Recipe ): About Carrying On Culinary Traditions,” Amina Gabrielov approaches culinary recipe description and propagation through the theoretical background of Olga Freidenberg theories of folklore and of food and ritual as source of genres. She will also incorporate Sergei Nekludov’s ideas of folkloric genres.

Papers:

“The Study of Folklore in the Russkoe Slovo Magazine: Performing Identity” – Oxana Vorobyova, Lomonosov Moscow State University

“Enacting the Folk Song in Dostoevsky’s “Akulka’s Husband”: Coming and Tragic Texts” – Cecilia Dilworth, Stockholm University

“Ritual, Recipe, Representation (of From Ritual to Recipe): About Carrying on Culinary Traditions” – Amina Gabrielova, Purdue University

Discussant: Viktoria Bashman, Hampden-Sydney College

 

Sunday, December 9

Internal Colonization: Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Hemlin

Sun, December 9, 12:00 to 1:45pm, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 1st, Boylston

The panel explores Alexander Etkind’s concept of “internal colonization” and Martin Buber’s notion of “I and thou” as essential for understanding both colonial and post-colonial relationships. The three papers examine how authors position themselves towards the “other” in a colonial, post-colonial, and philosophical sense through examinations of the works of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Hemlin. Nadja Berkovich’s paper investigates Dostoevsky’s position towards the colonial “other” through his relationship with two prominent ethnographers of his time, Petr Semenov Tian-Shanskii and Chokan Valikhanov, in light of Buber’s and Bakhtin’s theories of dialogue, as well by viewing his novel The Notes from the House of the Dead as an example of the “imperial imaginary.” Alexander Droznin’s paper engages with Bakhtin’s and Buber’s reading of Gogol’s Dead Souls and Inspector General, whose main picaresque characters exemplify both a homo interior and a homo exterior. Yuliya Minkova’s paper addresses the plot of internal colonization in Margarita Hemlin’s novel Doznavatel’ which presents an opportunity to discuss the issue of otherness in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Papers:

“The Imperial Imaginary in Dostoevsky” – Nadja Berkovich, University of Arkansas

“Participation and Experience: Martin Buber’s Intersubjectivity and the Gogolian Picaresque” – Alexander Droznin, Harvard University

“The Vagaries of Internal Colonization in Margarita Hemlin’s Doznavatel’” – Yuliya Minkova, Virginia Tech

Discussant: Taras Koznarsky, University of Toronto

With thanks to Vadim Shneyder, Assistant Professor at UCLA, for compiling the list! 

CFP: XVII International Dostoevsky Symposium

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The XVII International Dostoevsky Symposium
The XVII International Dostoevsky Symposium will be held at Boston University in the city of Boston (with the participation of Harvard University, Suffolk University, Wellesley College, Brown University, and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University), 15-19 July, 2019.
Abstracts: Proposals for papers on one of the Symposium themes will be accepted until July 1, 2018. Please send your proposal using the submission form at http://www.bu.edu/wll/dostoevsky-2019/. The Program Committee will review the submissions, and decisions will be announced on the IDS website by October 1, 2018. The Program will be announced on April 28, 2019.
The official languages of the Conference are Russian and English. Presentations should last about fifteen minutes, to be followed by 5 minutes of discussion.
Symposium participants will be limited to about 150 speakers. Membership in IDS is required before registration. Further information about membership can be found here: http://www.dostoevsky.org.

XVII Симпозиум международного общества Достоевского
XVII Симпозиум международного общества Достоевского состоится в Бостонском университете в Бостоне, США. Финансовую и организационную поддержку окажут Harvard University, Suffolk University, Wellesley College, Brown University и Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Симпозиум будет проходить с 15 по 19 июля 2019 года.
Заявки на участие в Симпозиуме будут приниматься до 1 июля 2018 года. Пожалуйста, присылайте тезисы докладов и регистрационные формы в электронном виде через портал hhttp://www.bu.edu/wll/dostoevsky-2019/. Отборочная комиссия рассмотрит ваши заявки и объявит состав участников на сайте Международного общества Достоевского к 1 октября 2018 года. Программа симпозиума будет сформирована и опубликована к 28 апреля 2019 года.
Официальные языки симпозиума – русский и английский. Каждому участнику выделяется 15 минут для доклада и дополнительно 5 минут для дискуссии.
Количество участников симпозиума с докладами – около 1 5 0-ти человек. До регистрации необходимо подтвердить членство в Международном обществе Достоевского (IDS). Дополнительная информацияо членстве в IDS размещена на сайте : http://www.dostoevsky.org.

Symposium Theme:
150 years of The Idiot
The Symposium will celebrate 150 years of The Idiot, with a focus on new and multidisciplinary approaches to the novel. Sessions will include:

  • The Idiot in its time and 150 years later
  • Digital Dostoevsky
  • Late Dostoevsky and The Life of a Great Sinner
  • Dostoevsky and the West
  • Dostoevsky and Translation
Cultural Program
The cultural program will include a visit to Walden Pond, a film screening at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a tour of historical landmarks.
Housing and Meals
Participants will be housed in air-conditioned dormitories on the Charles River Campus of Boston University (in central Boston, right next to the St. Paul Street subway stop) at a price of $ 86 per person a night.
Buffet-style breakfast and lunch will be served each morning and noon, provided courtesy of a series of co-sponsors, including Boston University, Harvard University, Brown University and Wellesley College. Coffee and refreshments will be served throughout the day courtesy of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.
The Symposium will end with a celebratory banquet overlooking the Boston Harbor.
Funding
Accommodation and travel expenses will be borne by the participants, but we are dedicated to developing a fund to help defray conference fees and the costs of travel and accommodations for those in need of financial assistance.
Conference Fee
The conference fee will be $150 for participants ($100 for spouses).
Visas
For participants from countries requiring visas to the US, letters of invitation will be issued by the International Students and Scholars Office at Boston University.
Airport and Transportation
Boston Logan Airport is located near downtown Boston. The average time on the subway from the airport to the Boston University campus is under one hour. The average taxi fare from the airport to campus is $35.

Тема симпозиума:
150 лет со дня публикации романа «Идиот»
Симпозиум отметит 150-летие романа «Идиот» и осветит новые и междисциплинарные подходы к изучению романа. Предполагаемые темы заседаний:

  • «Идиот» при жизни Достоевского и 150 лет спустя
  • Достоевский и информационные технологии ( Digital Dostoevsky )
  • Поздний Достоевский и «Житие великого грешника»
  • Достоевский и Запад
  • Достоевский в переводах
Культурная программа
В программу симпозиума будут включены поездка на Уолденский пруд, экскурсия по историческим местам Бостона, а также просмотр фильмов в Бостонском музее изобразительных искусств.
Проживание и питание
Участникам будет организовано проживание на кампусе Бостонского университета. Университет предоставляет кондиционированные комнаты в общежитии по цене 86 долларов в день на человека. Общежитие находится в центре города, на берегу реки Чарльз, недалеко от станции метро St. Paul Street.
Завтраки и обеды (шведский стол) в течение 4х дней будут обеспечены нашими спонсорами — Boston University, Harvard University, Brown University и Wellesley College. Кофе и легкие закуски обеспечит Harriman Institute. Симпозиум завершится «Пиром на пирсе» — банкетом в бостонской гавани.
Финансирование
Большинство участников должны будут сами оплатить проезд и проживание, но мы понимаем, что некоторым коллегам может понадобиться финансовая помощь. Мы постараемся найти средства и обеспечить поддержку тем, кто в ней нуждается.
Регистрационный взнос
Для участников с докладом взнос составит 150 долларов. Для гостей и членов семей – 100 долларов.
Визы
Всем участникам, кому требуется виза в США, будут высланы официальные приглашения из Бостонского университета.
Как добраться из аэропорта
Boston Logan Airport расположен недалеко от центра города. На метро Вы сможете добраться до университета меньше, чем за час. Средняя стоимость поездки на такси (20-25 минут) составляет 35 долларов.
Организаторы / Conference co-organizers:

  • Yuri Corrigan (Boston University)
  • Evgenia Cherkasova (Suffolk University)
  • William Mills Todd III (Harvard University)
  • Svetlana Evdokimova (Brown University)
  • Deborah Martinsen (Columbia University)
  • Carol Apollonio (Duke University)
  • Brian Armstrong (Augusta University)
Спонсоры / Sponsors :

  • The International Dostoevsky Society ( IDS )
  • The North American Dostoevsky Society (NADS)
  • Boston University Department of World Languages and Literatures
  • Harvard University Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
  • Brown University Department of Slavic Studies
  • Wellesley College Department of Russian
  • Suffolk University College of Arts and Sciences
  • Harriman Institute, Columbia University
  • The North American Dostoevsky Society

For more details, please visit the symposium website.

 

Big Fat Books: Worlds of The Brothers Karamazov

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On Saturday April 7, Boston University will host a one-day symposium: “Worlds of The Brothers Karamazov.” The symposium is part of an annual series on “Big Fat Books” run by the Department of World Languages & Literatures in which scholars from various disciplines and literatures present comparative approaches to a major text of world literature. Our keynote speakers this year are Robin Feuer Miller (“Dostoevsky Writ Small”) and Gary Saul Morson (“Six Theses on KARAMAZOV“). Their addresses will be followed by two panels of BU faculty (Comparative Karamazov West and East), and then by a student panel of close readings. Michael Katz (Middlebury College), William Mills Todd III (Harvard University), and Evgenia Cherkasova (Suffolk University Boston) will serve as chairs. There will be breakfast, lunch, and a closing reception. If you find yourself in the Boston area, please feel free to stop by for all or part of the proceedings. (See flyer for place, times, details.)

2018 KARAMAZOV flyer

Dostoevsky Panels and Papers at AATSEEL 2018!

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AATSEEL is just around the corner!

As always, there’s lots to see, but make sure to carve out time in your schedule for Fyodor Mikhailovich. Here is a list of the papers and panels on Dostoevsky (including time, location, and who’s presenting). See you there!

(List compiled by Greta Matzner-Gore, Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California)

 

Friday, February 2

8:00-10:00 AM

 

Stream 3A: Mimesis in Russian Art and Aesthetic Theory (I)

Location: Declaration B

Panelist: S. Ceilidh Orr, Willamette University

Title: “Zachem eto u nas ne odinakovyi pocherk?”: Imitation and alienation in Dostoevsky’s copyist fiction

 

Saturday, February 3

8:00-10:00 AM

 

Stream 1B: Tolstoevsky: Dostoevsky and Internality

Location: Declaration A

Panelist: Brian Armstrong, Augusta University

Title: Undomesticating the Sublime in The Idiot

Panelist: Paul Contino, Pepperdine University

Title: Alyosha and Kolya: The Recovery of Internality in The Brothers Karamazov

Panelist: Yuri Corrigan, Boston University

Title: Transgression and Obedience: Dostoevsky on Evil, Before and After Auschwitz

 

1:15-3:00 pm

Stream 4B: Translation (II): Translation and Diaspora: Poetics of Translation

Location: Penn Quarter A

Panelist: Eugenia Kelbert, School of Philology, Higher School of Economics

Title: Translating Style: Dostoevsky in Emigration

3:15-5:00pm

Stream 1B: Tolstoevsky (III): Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Religion and Literature

Location: Declaration A

Panelist: Jimmy Sudario Cabral

Title: Dostoevsky: Religion, Nihilism, and Negative Theology 

Panelist: Jesse Stavis, Bryn Mawr College

Title: The Prince and the Pauper: Resurrection, Crime and Punishment, and the Question of Conversion

Panelist: Maxwell Parlin, Princeton University

Title: Three Levs Nikolaevich: Tolstoy, Myshkin, Odoevtsev. Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House as Commentary to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

 

Russian Modernist Discourse and Perspectives

Location: Latrobe

Panelist: Lindsay Ceballos, Lafayette College

Title: De-Monologizing Early Symbolist Discourse on Dostoevsky

Sunday, February 4

8:00-10:00am

North American Dostoevsky Society

Location: Tiber Creek A

Panelist: Erica Drennan, Columbia University

Title: To America or Siberia? Binaries and Porous Boundaries in Crime and Punishment 

Panelist: Molly Rose Avila, Columbia University

Title: A Calligraphic Gaze

10:15am-12:00pm

Dostoevsky: Texts and Contexts

Location: Banneker

Panelist: Vladimir Ivantsov, Williams College

Title: “Awfully Fond of Children”: Children and the Exit from the Underground in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

Panelist: Saera Yoon, UNIST

Title: Another Loveless Father: Grigory in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

Panelist: Maria Whittle, University of California Berkeley

Title: Still Dreaming: Spatiotemporal Practice in Dostoevskii’s Belye Nochi

 

CFP – First Symposium of the Bulgarian Dostoevsky Society

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In collaboration with Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the National museum of Literature (Sofia), the Museum of Christian Art (Sofia), the Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow), the State Museum of the History of Russian Literature (Moscow), the Research Center of Vjacheslav Ivanov (Romе), and the Society of Akira Kurosawa (Japan), the Bulgarian Dostoevsky Society is organizing an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on the anthropology of Dostoevsky in reference to philosophical anthropology and European culture of the 20th century,  Russian religious-philosophical thinking and culture of the 20th century, and specifically on the novel “Idiot” (on occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the novel). The symposium will take place in Sofia on October 23-26, 2018.

The invitation is addressed to specialists from various fields of knowledge and research such as philosophers, specialists in literary studies, linguists, theologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, etc. The official languages of the symposium are Russian, English and Bulgarian. Presentations, which should last exactly 20 minutes, will be followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion.

Prospective participants should submit abstracts (up to 250 words) by e-mail to symposium2018@bod.bg by 31 January 2018. The organizing committee will get back to you with their decision at the beginning of March. The formal call for papers (in Russian and English) can be found here (and includes more information), and the preliminary schedule can be found here.

All those who work on Dostoevsky are warmly invited to consider participating in this symposium!

Dostoevsky and Russian lit panels at MLA 2018

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Happy New Year to all! If you find yourself at the MLA Convention in New York City this week, please join us on Thursday, Jan. 4  for the presidential theme panel organized by the International Dostoevsky Society, “Dostoevsky and States of Insecurity.” Here are the details:

Session 150: Dostoevsky and States of Insecurity

Time: Thursday, Jan. 4, 2018, 5:15–6:30 PM

Place: New York Hilton Midtown, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, “Midtown” Room

Program:

Presider: Carol Apollonio, Duke U.

“Sovereignty and Exception in Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky with Carl Schmitt”(Ilya Kliger, New York U)

“Arkady’s Overcoat: Illegitimacy and Characterization in Dostoevsky” (Chloë Kitzinger, Rutgers, the State U of New Jersey)

“‘Like a Cat around a Hot Saucer of Milk’: Dostoevsky’s Destabilizing Descriptions of Perverse Sexuality” (Zachary Johnson, U of California, Berkeley)

You may also be interested in the  following Russian literature-related panels and papers:

 

Session 12: Revolution, Take 2: Exporting the Russian Revolution

Thursday, Jan. 4, 2018, 12:00-1:15 PM (Hilton, Regent)

Participants include: Katerina Clark (Yale U.), Matthias Müller (Cornell U.), Darja Filippova (Princeton U.), Masha Salazkina (Concordia U.)

 

Session 289: Transatlantic Translations of Trans

Friday, Jan. 5, 2018, 12:00-1:15 PM (Hilton, Midtown)

Participants include: Jessie M. Labov (Central European U.), Brian James Baer (Kent State U.), Vitaly Chernetsky (U. of Kansas), Sandra Joy Russell (U. of Massachusetts, Amherst), Kārlis Vērdiņš (Washington U. in St Louis)

 

Session 394: Alternative Pasts and Futures in Postsocialist Science Fiction

Friday, Jan. 5, 2018, 3:30–4:45 PM (Hilton, Midtown)

Participants include: Jefferson J.A. Gattrall (Montclair State U.), Julia Gerhard (U. of Colorado, Boulder), Natalija Majsova (U of Ljubljana), Reed Johnson (U of Virginia)

 

Session 531: Meter, Rhyme, and Dialogue with the Other: Translating from Arabic, Russian, and Spanish into English, including a paper on translating Elena Fanailova

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018, 10:15 AM–11:30 AM (Hilton, Concourse C)

Participants include: Karen Emmerich (Princeton U.), Gregary Joseph Racz (Long Island U., Brooklyn), Sibelan Forrester (Swarthmore C), Mbarek Sryfi (U of Pennsylvania)

 

Session 636: Redefining Self-Translation, including two papers on Vladimir Nabokov’s translations of his own poetry and prose.

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018, 3:30–4:45 PM (Hilton, Concourse E)

Participants include: Genevieve Waite (Graduate Center, City U of New York), Jean-Christophe Cloutier (U. of Pennsylvania), Michael G. Boyden (Uppsala U.), Adrian J. Wanner (Penn State U.), Julia Titus (Yale U.)

 

Session 654: Literature of Waste and Environmental Insecurity in Central and Eastern Europe

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018, 3:30–4:45 PM (Hilton, Hudson)

Participants include: Julia Vaingurt (U of Illinois, Chicago), Heather I. Sullivan (Trinity U), Colleen McQuillen (U of Illinois, Chicago), Christopher Harwood (Columbia U)

 

Session 697: Bad Translation, including the paper: “The Russian Crime and Punishment in the Argentine Seven Madmen; or, How Bad Translations Made Good Literature”

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018, 5:15–6:30 pm (Hilton, Concourse F)

Participants include: Benjamin Paloff (U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Bret Maney (Lehman C, City U. of New York), Ellen Elias-Bursac (American Literary Translators Assn.), Adel Fauztdinova (Boston U.)

 

Hope to see you there!

This list has been compiled by Chloë Kitzinger, a member of the North American Dostoevsky Society Readers’ Advisory Board and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers.

Thoughts on ‘Revolutionary Dostoevsky: Rethinking Radicalism’

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by Bilal Siddiqi

‘Dostoevsky’ and ‘revolution’ seem to be an unlikely pair of bedfellows. As a writer who actively sought to refute the revolutionary ideologies of his time, while maintaining staunch support for Russian monarchy, Dostoevsky may be better understood as an ‘anti-revolutionary’ writer. But is this all there is to be said on the matter?

UCL’s conference on ‘Revolutionary Dostoevsky: Rethinking Radicalism’ aimed at understanding the ways in which Dostoevsky can be connected with ‘revolution’. Carol Apollonio’s provocatively titled keynote address, ‘Dostoevsky the Bolshevik’ cleared space for just such an unlikely association.

Carol

Carol Apollonio’s keynote. Image credit: Muireann Maguire

Acknowledging the fact that Dostoevsky quite deliberately wrote against the revolutionary writers of his time including Chernyshevsky and Pisarev, Professor Apollonio unpicked some of the undercurrents of revolution pulsing through the author’s oeuvre: his revolutionary poetics, producing gripping narratives dominated by the anti-heroic perspectives of Dostoevsky’s famous rebels that still seem modern to us some 150 years after publication; his nascent and ill-fated participation in the Petrashevsky circle, the mock-execution and sentence of exile handed down to him for a political transgression; the universal respect accorded to Dostoevsky at his funeral, when revolutionaries and conservatives gathered together in a bipartisan show of admiration. All these indicate that Dostoevsky and revolution are much more intricately interwoven than might first appear. It is certainly the case that Dostoevsky’s novels penetrate deeper into the revolutionary psyche than other ‘anti-nihilist’ writers of his time.

However, if objections still persist, perhaps we can nuance our definition of ‘revolution’. ‘Revolutionary thinking’ need not always indicate the desire for forced societal change in the name of Western European proletarian ideals. Instead, it may indicate, more broadly, the possibility of radical societal and/or personal transformation. Towards the end of her address, Professor Apollonio alluded, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to modern fascinations with cryonics and the possibility of ‘resurrection’. She made associations with the peculiar 19th-century theorizing of Nikolai Fedorov, to imply that revolution in Dostoevsky, whose belief in the possibility of apocalyptic resurrection is well known, need not refer only to politico-ideological mutation, but also to wholesale existential transformation.

George P

George Pattison’s paper. Image credit: Muireann Maguire

In his paper, ‘A Willful Lazarus’, Alexis Klimoff explored how ‘resurrection’ in Dostoevsky refers to the possibility of individual spiritual revolution, or ‘resurrection’ implicit in the rebellious and ‘willful’ discourses of the underground man and other characters in the novels. In the same panel, George Pattison, delineated the metaphysical and ethical principles implicit in the path towards spiritual revolution signposted in Dostoevsky’s novels. His paper, titled ‘We are all guilty – but for what?’ discussed exactly what it purported to, drawing insightful contrasts between seminal and volitional guilt, and emphasizing the author’s belief in freely undertaken individual moral responsibility ‘for all’, in order to illuminate the theosophical intricacies built into Dostoevsky’s fundamental leitmotif of universal guilt. The reference to Levinas is certainly an apt one, for the philosopher quite openly appropriates Dostoevsky’s conception of universal guilt – of ‘Each being guilty for all’ (‘and ‘I’ more than Others’, Levinas might add, as Dostoevsky nods agreeably from the grave) repeatedly in his philosophy. The robust connection between Dostoevsky and Levinas has not yet been adequately explained and Professor Pattison’s talk shed light on some of the significant moral congruencies that exist between the two thinkers.

Apart from the various explorations of ‘spiritual revolution’ in Dostoevsky’s fiction, there was also a broad focus throughout the conference on the inter-relations between characters and the striking radicality and prescience implicit in the structure of these dialogic relations: Artemy Magun recognized the constant experimentation, probing and provocation underlying Dostoevsky’s fictional world; Lynn Patyk presented the theme of ‘provocation’ and how it relates to unmasking and double-voiced discourse; Malcolm Jones recognized the Derridian undertones to the underground man’s narrative all directly or indirectly raised questions about the nature and telos of the dialogism which structures relations between characters in Dostoevsky’s novels.

Contextualizing ‘dialogism’ briefly though Bakhtin may help underscore the innovation and creativity of this line of inquiry into Dostoevsky’s fiction. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s dialogism, his myriad double-voiced discourses, and the infinite fragmentation of public consciousness they imply serve an integral dialectical purpose in his fiction. Characters seek, through interpenetrative dialogue with one another, to pursue the truths of their own consciousness, and achieve a sense of polyphonic harmony, subsistence in difference, a sobornost’, a holy ‘communion of unmerged souls’.

Denis Zhernokleyev’s paper on the influence of the demonic feuilleton on Dostoevsky’s novels puts into question this ‘optimistic’ understanding of the dialogism inherent in the fiction. Looking particularly at the idea of false confession in Notes from the Underground and malicious relationships in The Devils, Denis was able to demonstrate the complex psychology underpinning these dialogic interactions between Dostoevsky’s diverse set of ideologues. He identified the narrative significance of epistemic violence as the root malevolent desire of Dostoevsky’s more ‘demonic’ interlocutors when they engage in lively metaphysical, social and moral debates. Essentially, this argument puts into question the ‘constructive’ nature of these dialogic interactions, suggesting implicitly that their core function is fragmentation without individual redemption.

This thread of discussion on the nature of dialogic relations was particularly interesting for two central reasons. First, it emphasized how scholarship now appears to be more interested in the ontological nature of the relations between characters, than with the specific ‘content’ of the characters’ own theosophical positions. Secondly, it may be argued that this thread draws on long-standing philosophical questions about the nature of the relation between identity and difference. If the epistemic violence implicit in dialogic relations implies the impossibility of characters maintaining a unified perspective, without offering forth a constructive path towards personal redemption, or towards a primordial experience of their own individuated truth or ‘idea-force’, then there is no identity in Dostoevsky’s works, only diffusion, fragmentation, non-identity and difference in the relation or connection between compromised self-identities. In other words, the probing, experimenting, provoking, epistemic violence in a character’s relationships with others does not produce a heightening or furthering of that character’s pursuit of their own deepest self, of their authentic self-identity. Instead, malice becomes its own reward. Dostoevsky’s vast exploration of human nature ultimately reflects only the ubiquity of human desire for malicious pleasure.

In response to this, perhaps it could be demonstrated that characters do manage to subsist on the threshold of experience, even if only for a few precious ‘eternal’ moments, to achieve a sense of self-identity by experiencing the possibility of the transcendent validity of their own deepest ‘idea-forces’.  If this were true, then the dialogic relations between characters, even though often wrought in a desire for epistemic violence, may indeed have a ‘constructive’ aspect to them, as they serve to raise characters towards the momentary fulfillment of their deepest metaphysical and moral ideas.

The talk by Denis was clearly brilliant, and offered much food for thought. There were also noteworthy papers by Chloë Papadopoulos, Muireann Maguire, Vadim Shkolnikov, Lindsay Ceballos, Yuliya Shcherbina, Connor Doak and many others on a variety of topics related to revolution and radical thinking in Dostoevsky. I apologize for not being able to give them the due attention they deserve in this brief blog post.

The author reads his paper
The organizer, Sarah Young, listening

The above images are of the author (L) and the conference organizer, Sarah Young (R). Both were taken by Muireann Maguire. Many thanks to Dr Maguire for granting permission to use her photos, both these and the above, for this blog post!

Bilal Siddiqi is a PhD student in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. He is currently writing on the role of ‘epiphany’ in Dostoevsky’s Post-Siberian fiction, as well as exploring congruencies between Dostoevsky’s fiction and existential phenomenology. He delivered a paper at the conference titled, ‘Death and Immortality: Spiritual Revolution in Dostoevsky’s Demons’