Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature

Vasily Rozanov and the Body of Russian Literature

Henrietta Mondry's monograph is the first interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of the most original and controversial turn-of-the-century Russian writer and thinker, Vasily Rozanov, Once described as the Russian Freud, Rozanov developed a unique methodology for his writing, a methodology based on the interpretation of cultural history through the lens of sexuality. As such, he can be viewed as a Russian Foucault who wrote his own original history of sexuality in application to the main Russian classical writers of the nineteenth century. The book focuses on the constructs of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality which Rozanov used to explicate the political, social, and artistic narratives of the "great five" of Russian literature: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgencv, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Further, it explores how Rozanov applied the concept of "impure" blood in order to demonize writers and important cultural personalities from the democratic camp, thus setting a trend in Russian culture to fight an ideological enemy by exposing his or her often invented "racial" alterity. Forbidden for publication in the Soviet Union because of his political views, Rozanov enjoys an immense popularity in contemporary Russia, where his paradoxical and controversial statements have been incorporated into the propaganda employed by Russian nationalists of various denominations. In a rigorous and yet engaging manner, Mondry offers the most thought-provoking interpretation of this influential Russian thinker's views and exposes the manipulation of his antisemitic and rightwing opinions by members of contemporary Russian political and cultural elites ... a significant and important ... contribution to Rozanov studies. [Mondry's] subject is Rozanov's complex and mutable relationship with 19th- century Russian literature and its creators, which she expertly explores through the Rozanovian matrix of sex, race and religion in the context of his own psychological complexes, the development of his thought, contemporary discourse on sexual pathology in its relation to race and art, and key historical events, notably the trial of the Jewish factory worker Menahem Mendel Beilis for the ritual murder of a Christian child (1911 13) and the Russian Revolution. Chapters on Pushkin, Gogol´, Dostoevskii, Turgenev and Tolstoi are framed by an excellent essay on the Beilis Affair as a turning point in the relationship between Rozanov's discourse on Russian literatureand his attitude towards the Jews, and a courageous and timely concluding essay on the politics of the reception and dissemination of Rozanov's work in post-Soviet Russia. --Ruth Coates, Slavonic & East European Review