Revisiting Russian Radicals

Revisiting Russian Radicals is a collection of ten articles that seeks to promote a revisitation of the Russian Radicals who have been somewhat unjustly forgotten in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Rather than viewing the radicals through the lens of the 1917 October Revolution, the authors seek to analyze them on their own terms and explore new aspects of their legacy. The chapters provide a fresh look at some well-known radicals like Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, and Pisarev as well as examinations of lesser-known figures, and offer an interdisciplinary approach to their investigations, combining historical and literary analysis. A lengthy introduction is included for those who are non-Slavists, and for the newer generation of Slavists who may not be as familiar with these figures.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Christopher Ely Introduction: Russian Radicals Revisited Andrew M. Drozd Chapter 1: Nikolai Dobrolyubov’s Social and Political Theory Revisited Alexey Vdovin Chapter 2: Rakhmetov and Reading in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Andrew M. Drozd Chapter 3: New People as Others: Race and Empire in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Valeria Sobol Chapter 4: Who Can Claim the “Heritage of Serfdom?”: On the Racial Representation of Radical Heroes in Russian Literature of the 1860s–1870s Lindsay Ceballos Chapter 5: Dmitry Pisarev: Nihilism, Darwinism, and Man’s Place in Nature Brendan G. Mooney Chapter 6: The History of a Plot: Nikolai Uspensky and the Representation of the Narod in Russian Fiction Kirill Zubkov Chapter 7: “The Expansion of Western Civilization”: Aleksandr Pypin on Pan-Slavism and Czech Nationalism Anastasia Williams Chapter 8: The Napoleonic Myth in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The History of a Town and The Pompadours Charles L. Byrd Chapter 9: Peacocks and Crows: The Populist Discourse on Progress and Individual Happiness in the Works of Ivan Kushchevsky and Andrei Osipovich-Novodvorsky Victoria Thorstensson Chapter 10: Reconstructing the Radical Mind: Bakunin’s Texts and Their Anarchist Legacy James Goodwin About the Contributors

About the Author :
Andrew M. Drozd is associate professor of Russian at the University of Alabama. Brendan G. Mooney is Fellow at the Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and visiting assistant professor of Russian at Miami University of Ohio.

Review :
This excellent collection of essays not only revisits, but also rethinks, revises, and rediscovers the radical critics of mid-nineteenth-century Russian literature. It includes provocative studies of familiar figures (Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, and Pisarev), as well as new work on lesser-known critics (Kushchevsky, Osipovich-Novodvorsky, and others). It is both an illuminating and refreshing read… “This collection brings together an international group of scholars, united by their interest in the legacy of Russia’s nineteenth-century radical tradition. What results is a powerful vision of that rich corpus, extracted from the century-long, bipolar predicament of Soviet teleological valorization and post-Soviet (as well as anti-Soviet) dismissive neglect. The breadth of approaches represented in this collection make it legible not only to Slavists, but also to generalists, interested in intellectual history, the history of science, as well as race and postcolonial theory. The outcome is informative, timely, and consistently thought-provoking.”