| Course Description |
For the nobility of the Russian Empire, daily life for the better part of the 19th century resembled
a carefully choreographed performance. One’s time in public was delicately scripted according
to a stifling web of unspoken expectations, obligatory social ceremony, and mannered
pageantry—all under the watchful, surveilling eyes of the Autocracy (to say nothing of one’s
vicious peers in high society!). The cheap glamours and shameless inauthenticity of high society
life were a common complaint among Russian writers of the 1800s, who bemoaned the falsity
and vanity of their milieu at large. But this pervasive sense of deceit, theatricality, and artifice
was tremendously productive to the Russian literature of the period—as writers developed
devices and vocabulary for interrogating hidden motivations, used new forms and genres to
create and maintain intriguing public personae through their texts, and cleverly deployed their
talents to manipulate the codes that restricted them in order to perform new literary identities
more effectively. An attentive history of Russian literature in the 1800s, then, is in no small part
a history of the ways that Russian writers sought to turn their daily lives into pieces of legible
artistic text, bound by the same constructive principles that their verses and stories often were.
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