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This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy’s broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular culture. Her work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialist impulses and rhetoric in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement. In addition to some of Nepomnyashchy’s best previously published scholarly work, this volume includes excerpts from The Politics of Tradition: Rerooting Russian Literature After Stalin, the book manuscript that Nepomnyashchy was working on in the last years of her life.
“Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy was an inspiring intellectual force of nature. She made an indelible mark in two fields—Slavic studies and comparative literature—and distinguished herself as a caring teacher, a visionary academic leader, and an adventurous scholar whose thirst for interdisciplinary knowledge and understanding was contagious. This volume gathers her most important writing on poetry, dance, fiction, and television and organizes it with a view to her abiding concern for the specter of empire in Russian culture and society. Her characteristic curiosity and insight jump from every page.”
— Rory Finnin, University of Cambridge
“An inspirational figure for generations of students, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy was a tirelessly inventive scholar of Russian culture with a rare talent for forging connections and opening up new angles of inquiry. This valuable collection showcases her extraordinary range of intellectual interests across the span of modern Russian cultural history, from innovative studies of classic authors (Pushkin, Nabokov) to authoritative accounts of temporality in late Soviet literature (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky), from the gender politics of ballet to pathbreaking analyses of Soviet and post-Soviet popular culture. Throughout, we are in the presence of a scholar whose penetrating interpretative gaze and acute feel for the social life of culture nurtured a commitment to understanding Russian culture within a global context and in resistance to state-centric narratives. She is much missed, and this collection is a fitting testament to her legacy in Slavic Studies and beyond.”
— Edward Tyerman, University of California, Berkeley
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy was Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian and Chair of the Slavic Department at Barnard College and Director of the Harriman Institute (2001-2009). Her scholarly interests included Pushkin, nineteenth-century journals, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Russian ballet, and literary and political developments in post-Soviet Russia.
Emily D. Johnson is Brian and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma. She works on twentieth and twenty-first century Russian culture. Most recently, she co-edited the volume Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (Indiana University Press, 2022) with Alan Barenberg.
Irina Reyfman is Professor of Russian Literature at Columbia University. The focus of her work is interaction of literature and culture. She is the author and editor of several books, including How Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Tables of Rank (The University of Wisconsin Press: 2016; paperback 2021).
Carol R. Ueland is Professor Emerita at Drew University. Her scholarly works are on Russian poetry and translation, women’s studies and biograpy. Her most recent book is Literary Biographies in the Lives of Remarkable People Series, co-edited with Ludmilla A. Trigos (Lexington Books, 2022).
Introduction: Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy as a Scholar of Russian Culture
Emily D. Johnson, Irina Reyfman, and Carol Ueland
Part 1. Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin, and Katkov
1. The Poet, History, and the Supernatural: A Note on Pushkin’s “The Poet” and The Bronze Horseman
2. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: A Curious Case of Cultural Cross-Fertilization?
3. A Note on Curiosity in Pushkin’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great
4. Katkov and the Emergence of the Russian Messenger
Part 2. Russia and the West
5. Jane Austen in Russia: Hidden Presence and Belated Boom
6. King, Queen, Sui-Mate: Nabokov’s Defense against Freud’s “Uncanny”
7. “Imperially, My Dear Watson”: Sherlock Holmes and the Decline of the Soviet Empire
Part 3. The Soviet/Post-Soviet Experience
8. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago: The Resurrection of the Living Past
9. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Its Intertexts: Aksakov’s “Stepan Mikhailovich’s Good Day” and Kataev’s Time Forward!
10. Koshkin Dom: Following the Golden Shoelace
11. Tatiana Tolstaia: The Text of Family and the Family in the Text—Genealogy, Gender, and the Rhetoric of Lineage
Part 4. Russian Culture, High and Low
12. Dance as Metaphor: The Russian Ballerina and the Imperial Imagination
13. The Blockbuster Miniseries on Soviet TV: Isaev-Shtirlits, the Ambiguous Hero of Seventeen Moments in Spring
14. Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv
Selected Publications by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy
Index