Styling Russia: Multiculture in the Prose of Nikolai Leskov

In response to the clichéd view of Nikolai Leskov as an exceptionally gifted stylist and “the most Russian of writers,” this book explores a nineteneeth-century storyteller who was a patriot and believer in the spiritual uniqueness of the Russian people, yet who also represented, or styled, ethnic identity as unstable and permeable. By combining key concepts from modern literary theory and semiotics, as well as from anthropology and the theory of culture, it investigates the image of human life as portrayed in five of Leskov’s most celebrated works, amongst them Cathedral Folk and The Enchanted Wanderer. Here the lay theological attitudes that inform them can be said to challenge the idea of the multiethnic Empire as a culturally unified nation state.

Knut Andreas Grimstad is Associate Professor and Head of Polish Studies in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo. The co-editor of Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose (2005), he has also published on early Russian hagiography as well as Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose. Among Grimstad’s current research interests are popular culture and Jewish-Polish relations in independent Poland 1918–39.

Contents

Introduction
Opinions and approaches
Multiculture and the resonance of styles
National romanticism and national literature
What this book does

Chapter One · Myth-Making Movements
Mingling, conflict, and syncretism
Local discord and everyday heroism
Meaning in-between styles/texts/cultures
Complexity in simplicity or, a “Russian” Russia
Chapter Two · Idyllizing the Russian Provinces
A language of feeling
The imperfections of the societal idyll
Orthodoxy as micro-harmony
The multiple facets of sentimental idyllization
Chapter Three · The Problem of Multiethnicity
Myth, manner, meaning
In the company of strangers (otherness, foreignness)
The accommodation of Polishness
Processing cultural diversity
Chapter Four · Adapting the Christian Text
The social and the personal
Transformation in imitation
“Imitation” as continuation
Identity formation and the significance of sociality
Roots of ambivalence
Chapter Five · The Sealed Angel
A common contrivance
Loss, discovery, or “an account of the places through which we travelled”
An English master builder
The purpose of sentimental dreaming
Chapter Six · The Enchanted Wanderer
The adventures of an unwilling adventurer
Under the Tatar yoke
Gypsies, tramps and thieves
Surveying Russian history
Chapter Seven · On the Edge of the World
A Christological discussion
Going East
The potential of borderlands
Apocatastasis, or an optimistic worldview
Chapter Eight · Childhood Years
The art of remembering
A journey from St Petersburg to Kiev
Polishness revisited
The dictates of the heart
Restless identities: Who are Leskov’s Russians?
Epilogue
Leskov’s texts as testaments to “idyllic utopia”
Religious pluralism or, transcending multiculture
By way of conclusion
Works Cited
Index of Names