Thesiss

In my paper, I investigate how money is depicted and the way it plays a primary function and catalyst in its interactions with the other protagonists, how attitudes toward money manifest in the characters’ actions and reveal their characteristics, and how it contributes to the p…

The titular councilor plays a special role in Russian literature. Some of the most celebrated works of nineteenth-century Russian authors focus on characters who hold this particular rank within the Russian bureaucratic system of social classification called the Table of Ranks. …

This dissertation explores the ethical and aesthetic stakes of readers’ judgments by analyzing mock trials of literary characters that were performed in Soviet Russia and abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. Literary trials were part of a larger craze for public mock trials in the dec…

This dissertation examines the intersections and tensions between religion and economy in Dostoevsky and Melville’s fiction. I argue that Christian theology of the body—as the site of both salvation and economic production—is at the center of their concern. These two profoundly …

Drawing on both direct personal experience and literary precedent (Radcliffe, Maturin, Dickens, Dumas and Hugo), Dostoevsky adapted the spaces of the cell and scaffold into a chronotope adequate to the novelistic depiction of the existential - namely, the protagonist's solitary …