Writing the Time of Troubles: False Dmitry in Russian Literature

by Marcia A. Morris

Overview

Is each moment in history unique, or do essential situations repeat themselves? The traumatic events associated with the man who reigned as Tsar Dmitry have haunted the Russian imagination for four hundred years. Was Dmitry legitimate, the last scion of the House of Rurik, or was he an upstart pretender? A harbinger of Russia’s doom or a herald of progress? Writing the Time of Troubles traces the proliferation of fictional representations of Dmitry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, showing how playwrights and novelists reshaped and appropriated his brief and equivocal career as a means of drawing attention to and negotiating the social anxieties of their own times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781618118639
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	08/20/2018
Series:	The Unknown Nineteenth Century
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Marcia A. Morris is Professor of Slavic Languages at Georgetown University. She is the author of Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature, The Literature of Roguery in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Russia and Russian Tales of Demonic Possession: Translations of Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation, Transliteration, Names, and Abbreviations
Introduction: Recurrence, Transference, and Dmitry
Chapter 1. Prelude
Chapter 2. Two Visions of Tyranny: The Late Eighteenth Century
Chapter 3. Verbal Self-Fashioning: The Early Nineteenth Century
Chapter 4. Two Visions of Reform: 1866
Chapter 5. Contingent Self-Fashioning: The Fin de Siècle
Dmitry: Re-resurrection and Conclusions
Sources Cited

Editorial Reviews

In this well-wrought book, Marcia Morris discusses the ways Russian writers have used the figure of False Dmitry to pose political, existential, and literary questions. … Morris argues that each writer’s approach to these questions expresses his relation to contemporaneous events as well as his view of the distant past. The argument is framed by narrative theory and trauma studies, and firmly grounded in studies of Russian history and literature—the footnotes alone provide a detailed map of the book’s argument. … We owe Marcia Morris a debt of gratitude for reading, contextualizing, and analyzing these works, including some that most of us would never encounter otherwise. This book is well worth reading.” —Sarah Pratt, University of Southern California, Russian Review Vol. 78, No. 2

Sarah Pratt