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Full Description
The culture of nineteenth-century Russia is often seen as dominated by realism in the arts, as exemplified by the novels of Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, the paintings of 'the Wanderers,' and the historical operas of Modest Mussorgsky. Paradoxically, nineteenth-century Russia was also consumed with a passion for spiritualist activities such as table-rappings, seances of spirit communication, and materialization of the 'spirits.' Ghostly Paradoxes examines the surprising relationship between spiritualist beliefs and practices and the positivist mindset of the Russian Age of Realism (1850-80) to demonstrate the ways in which the two disparate movements influenced each other.
Foregrounding the important role that nineteenth-century spiritualism played in the period's aesthetic, ideological, and epistemological debates, Ilya Vinitsky challenges literary scholars who have considered spiritualism to be archaic and peripheral to other cultural issues of the time. Ghostly Paradoxes is an innovative work of literary scholarship that traces the reactions of Russia's major realist authors to spiritualist events and doctrines and demonstrates that both movements can be understood only when examined together.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: A New World - Modern Spiritualism in Russia, 1853-1870s
PART ONE TABLE TALKS: SEANCE AS CULTURAL METAPHOR
1 Seance as Test, or, Russian Writers at a Spiritualist Rendezvous
2 Russian Glubbdubdrib: The Shade of False Dimitry and Russian Historical Imagination in the Age of Realism
3 Dead Poets' Society: Pushkin's Shade in Russian Cultural Mythology of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
PART TWO REALIST EXORCISM: SPIRITUALISM AND THE RUSSIAN LITERARY IMAGINATION OF THE 1860s TO 1880s
4 Flickering Hands: The Spiritualist Realism of Nikolai Vagner
5 The Middle World: The Realist Spiritualism of Saltykov-Shchedrin
6 The Underworld: Dostoevsky's Ontological Realism
7 The (Dis)infection: Art and Hypnotism in Leo Tolstoy
Epilogue: The Spirit of Literature - Reflections on Leskov's Artistic Spiritualism
Notes
Works Cited
Index
