Thinking Literature Sovereign Fictions

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, as well as 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. "Groundbreaking. . . . 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 "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