590. Radical Empathy in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature, Part I

Nineteenth-Century Russian literature is marked by an intense and abiding interest in the lives of the downtrodden and disenfranchised lower classes. Beginning with Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, serfs, the poor, subordinated bureaucrats, and distressed urban dwellers become the obsessive focus of the Russian literary imagination. The literary effort to understand the subjective experience of the neglected and oppressed classes inspires a tradition of radical empathy that becomes the creative wellspring of the great imaginative works of this period. Excerpts will be distributed in advance of the class.

Alexander Radishchev, Excerpts from Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

Nikolai Gogol, Excerpts from Dead Souls & “The Overcoat”

Ivan Turgenev, Stories from Sketches from a Hunter’s Album & “Mumu”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Excerpts from Notes from a Dead House