The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology

by Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch

• ISBN13: 9780299135249
• ISBN10: 0299135241
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Both wild and familiar, alien and self, the Russian Cossacks came to represent in nineteenth-century literature their nation's seemingly endless frontier, strongly influencing the self-image of the Russian people. The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature is the first book to study the development of the Cossack hero and to identify him as part of Russian cultural mythology. Judith Kornblatt explores the power of the myth as a literary image, providing new and challenging readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoi, Khlebnikov, Babel, Tsvetaeva, Sholokhov, and a host of lesser-known writers, all of whom were attracted to the Cossack. By comparing the Cossack with the American cowboy, she reveals what is both unique and universal about the Russian self-image. Grappling with the phenomenon of myth-formation, Kornblatt places the Cossack hero in historical and sociopolitical context, chronicling the growth of the Cossack myth of unbounded wholeness and life, its gradually increasing influence on the Russian national consciousness during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its eventual demise under the strictures of Stalinist socialist realism. Kornblatt's eclectic methodology draws upon Barthes, White, Turner, and other Western theorists as well as such leading Russian critics and philosophers of language as Bakhtin, Lotman, and Uspensky.

Author Biography

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt is assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
The Nineteenth Century
Introduction: From History to Myth	p. 3
Folk Poetry, Pushkin, and the Romantic Cossack Hero	p. 21
Gogol's Cossacks and the "Russian Soul"	p. 39
Death Transcended and the Female Threat	p. 61
Space and Time Unbounded	p. 71
Conclusion: The Ambivalent Tolstoi	p. 91
The Twentieth Century
Introduction: From Myth to History	p. 99
Isaak Babel and His Red Cavalry Cossacks	p. 107
Modern Poets and Their Cossack Rebels	p. 126
Mikhail Sholokhov and Transfer of the Staff of Power	p. 149
Socialist Realism and Death to the Cossack Myth	p. 164
Conclusion: Nabokov's Postmortem	p. 174
Notes	p. 179
Selected Bibliography	p. 211
Index	p. 223
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