" 'Maria Ivanovna Was Reclining on a Settee': Gleb Uspensky's Search for a New Optics (Article)
Title: " 'Maria Ivanovna Was Reclining on a Settee': Gleb Uspensky's Search for a New Optics
Author: Anna Schur
Abstract: To Gleb Uspensky’s contemporaries, his preference for short forms like sketches, notes, and fragments masked an artistic flaw – his inability to produce a novel. The paper reconsiders Uspensky’s generic choices as a deliberate critique of the novel form. This critique reflected Uspensky’s anxiety about the significance of individual personality and experience overvalued by the novel. Uspensky’s aspiration to transcend the novel’s preoccupation with an individual human fate in order to lay bare the conditions shaping the shared destiny of all led him to exchange the novel’s “microscopic” optics for a broader, panoramic lens. Such change in perspective dictated several other elements of his poetics: from rejecting the novel’s aesthetics of small detail to reconfiguring the traditional character structure.
Year: 2016
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Slavic Review
Publisher: Slavic Review

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