engleski

L. N. Tolstoy's “Victorian Russia”: Notes on English (Class) Cultures in Anna Karenina

Various scholars argued about the compatible logic of the literary and the economic, and about the mutual influences between the two. For example, in his seminal study Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, M. Bakhtin famously argued that economic systems provide historical conditions for the emergence of literary forms by claiming that the “polyphonic novel could indeed have been realized only in the capitalist era, ” and particularly in Russia, where “capitalism set in almost catastrophically.” The intention of this essay is to offer an in- depth analysis of intercultural connections between Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the Victorian novel (understood here in a broader sense, as a genre that explores various transitional aspects of modernity, most notably the transition from the pre-modern to the modern class system), especially keeping in mind that English cultural discourse in this novel is most frequently used when Tolstoy turns to literary representations of one of the main economic categories, namely that of class, and of interrelated processes of class culture formations through class struggle and class antagonism. Relying on the theoretical concepts of “overdetermination” and “points of entry, ” the essay explores the possibilities of contemporary literary scholarship to enter the imagination of class in literature, and examine class as the crucial organizing principle of the literary text. To that end, the analysis claims that the Russian writer relied so extensively on the Victorian novel (Anna Karenina is sometimes described as a novel about Victorian Russia) to articulate specifically literary dilemmas (about aesthetic resources and stylistic repositories of the Russian realist novel versus the Victorian novel in articulating the theme of adultery, and exploring the issues of family happiness), but also various facts of material economic history and monetary issues.

Anna Karenina, class cultures, Victorian novel

Predavanje je objavljeno u autorskoj monografiji; bibliografska jedinica 1003847.