“Russia's first anti-imperialist novel: Vasily Narezhny's The Black Year, or the Mountain Princes” - online lecture by Professor Harsha Ram
Events
Harsha Ram, associate professor of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures of the University of Berkeley, will read the lecture “Russia's first anti-imperialist novel: Vasily Narezhny's The Black Year, or the Mountain Princes” online as part of the regular colloquium of the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies on February 8, at 19:00.
About the lecture
In 1802, Vasily Narezhny (1780-1825), the Russian-speaking Ukrainian writer, worked for one year in the newly created Russian administration in Tbilisi. He was a participant of one of the most decisive events in the modern history of the Caucasus, the annexation of Kartli and Kakheti by Russia.
Life in the Caucasus gave him the impetus to create the novel “The Black Year, or the Mountain Princes”, which he probably wrote in St. Petersburg in the 1810s and it was published in 1829, after the author's death.
"The Black Year", the first extensive work of Russian literature, which takes place in the Caucasus, talks about a small principality of North Ossetia, probably in the early period of the modern era.
The novel, an endless narrative about a Caucasian prince obsessed with consolidating, maintaining, or regaining power, was seen as an attack on the foundations of Russian autocracy and was initially refused publication.
The novel, which was eventually published, was decried as aesthetically dull and antiquated. Narezhny's book, out of time and outside the canon of Russian literature, relies on various sources - starting from the “Mirror of the Princes” (Fürstenspiegel) and “Oriental Tale” (conte oriental), ending with Ukrainian Baroque folk traditions.
It is a grotesque, yet unrecognizable satire, the allegorizing of both Russian and Caucasian sovereignty has not yet been fully understood.
About the speaker
Harsha Ram's first book The Imperial Sublime (2003) deals with poetic genre, aesthetic theory, the relationship between space and political power in 18th and early 19th century Russian literature.
In his latest publications, professor Harsha Ram explores Russian-Georgian, Russian-French and Russian-Italian literary relations in the context of world literature and theories of comparative modernities. He is currently working on the book “The Geopoetics of Sovereignty”. The literature of the Russian-Georgian Encounter, which offers a historical analysis of cultural relations between Georgian and Russian writers and intellectuals during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
The book focuses on how Georgia and the Caucasus region as a whole were mapped, on the one hand, geopolitically, as a disputed territory, and on the other hand, geopoetically, as a space of natural and ethnolinguistic diversity.
Working language: English
Time: February 8, 19:00
Format: Platform Zoom
It is possible to attend the lecture based on prior registration.
To register, visit the link: https://bit.ly/3WyPCzp
2023