That Savage Gaze: Wolves in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Imagination

by Ian M. Helfant

Overview

Imperial Russia’s large wolf populations were demonized, persecuted, tormented, and sometimes admired. That Savage Gaze explores the significance of wolves in pre-revolutionary Russia utilizing the perspectives of cultural studies, ecocriticism, and human-animal studies. It examines the ways in which hunters, writers, conservationists, members of animal protection societies, scientists, doctors, government officials and others contested Russia’s “Wolf Problem” and the particular threat posed by rabid wolves. It elucidates the ways in which wolves became intertwined with Russian identity both domestically and abroad. It argues that wolves played a foundational role in Russians’ conceptions of the natural world in ways that reverberated throughout Russian society, providing insights into broader aspects of Russian culture and history as well as the opportunities and challenges that modernity posed for the Russian empire.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644691342
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	08/08/2019
Series:	The Unknown Nineteenth Century
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ian M. Helfant holds a joint position in Russian & Eurasian Studies and Environmental Studies at Colgate University, where he began teaching in 1998. His previous publications include The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia and many articles on imperial Russia.

Table of Contents

A Note on Translation and Transliteration
Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1
Harnessing the Domestic to Confront the Wild: Borzoi Wolf Hunting and Masculine Aggression in War and Peace

Chapter 2
The Rise of Hunting Societies, the Professionalization of Wolf Expertise, and the Legal Sanctioning of Predator Control with Guns and Poison

Chapter 3
Chekhov’s “Hydrophobia,” Kuzminskaya’s “The Rabid Wolf,” and the Fear of Bestial Madness on the Eve of Pasteur’s Panacea

Chapter 4
Fissures in the Flock: Wolf Hounding, the Humane Society, and the Literary Redemption of a Feared Predator
Conclusion

Endnotes
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Although Ian Helfant teaches Russian literature and language at Colgate University, That Savage Gaze presents the reader with a historical narrative: a shift in depictions of wolves in Russian literature during the Golden and Silver Ages, and especially in those isolated moments when human characters look directly into the eyes of wild animals. … Helfant provides scholars with an illuminating instance when literature, medicine, and environmental ethics converged, leading to surprising outcomes.” —Stephen Brain, Mississippi State University, the Russian Review Vol. 78, No. 3

The Russian Review - Stephen Brain

Minutely researched and grippingly presented, with vivid illustrations, That Savage Gaze is a fine example of ecocriticism: as representations of wolves lend us insight into the context of nineteenth-century Russian society, we follow Russian writers’ struggles to see the world through lupine eyes. It’s time to reintroduce the wolf, and other threatened species, to Russian Studies.” —Muireann Maguire, University of Exeter, Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 79, No. 3

Slavonic and East European Review - Muireann Maguire