This study revisits a well-known, but long-ignored Russian literary type—the so-called “superfluous man”—who emerges out of Russia’s growing pains in response to the French Revolution, its victory over Napoleon, and its late onset of romanticism. Russians felt homeless and without roots, and the intense ideological polemic over the East-West question defined much of the nineteenth century. Originating out of this historical context, the superfluous man is traditionally viewed as a weak-willed individual that fails to act, as a man with no agency or place in society. The first section presents and questions his traditional reception, arguing that the literary type is only superfluous when viewed through an ideological lens, and uses existential theory to demonstrate his inner development through the literary act that arises out of his exile. Thus, this dissertation redefines the superfluous man as a mediator between rigid ideologies that suppress individual freedom, allowing him to create a more organic community through his writings than those that simply subscribe to an external set of rules. The remaining sections trace a similar progression from type to individual during three points in the Soviet era: the Bolshevik Revolution, World War II, and the late-Soviet period. Drawing on several artists, I investigate the different choices—arcadia, utopia, or vnye (rejecting the ideological game altogether)—that were available to the individualist writer in an attempt to relieve his alienation from both himself and society. While all of the artists that I cover fit my new definition of the superfluous man as mediator, I ultimately consider Sergey Dovlatov’s use of the anecdote in the late Soviet era to be a more effective approach to the existential struggle associated with the human condition. Taken together, these chapters propose a new lineage for the superfluous man that places him at the forefront of Russia’s perpetual search for roots, which was relevant throughout the violent twentieth century and is still relevant in our technologically dehumanizing twenty first.
Carr, Christopher Henry,
"The Redemption of the 'Superfluous Man' in Russian Literature"
(2016).
Slavic Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0GT5KMP
