Fiction's Overcoat

by Clowes, Edith W.

• ISBN13: 9780801441929
• ISBN10: 0801441927
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-30
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

If Dostoevsky claimed that all Russian writers of his day "came out from Gogol's 'Overcoat,'" then Edith W. Clowes boldly expands his dramatic image to describe the emergence of Russian philosophy out from under the "overcoat" of Russian literature. In Fiction's Overcoat, Clowes responds to the view, commonly held by Western European and North American thinkers, that Russian culture has no philosophical tradition. If that is true, she asks, why do readers everywhere turn to the classics of Russian literature, at least in part because Russian writers so famously engage universal questions, because they are so "philosophical"? Her answer to this question is a lively and comprehensive volume that details the origins, submergence, and re-emergence of a rich and vital Russian philosophical tradition. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian philosophy emerged in conversation with narrative fiction, radical journalism, and speculative theology, developing a distinct cultural discourse with its own claim to authority and truth. Leading Russian thinkers-Berdiaev, Losev, Rozanov, Shestov, and Solovyov-made philosophy the primary forum in which Russians debated metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical questions as well as issues of individual and national identity. That debate was tragically truncated by the events of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet empire. Today, after seventy years of enforced silence, this particularly Russian philosophical culture has resurfaced. Fiction's Overcoat serves as a welcome guide to its complexities and nuances. Historians and cultural critics will find in Clowes's book the story of the increasing refinement and diversification of Russian cultural discourse, philosophers will find an alternative to the Western philosophical tradition, and students of literature will enjoy the opportunity to rethink the great Russian novelists-particularly Dostoevsky, Pasternak, and Platonov-as important voices in the process of shaping and sustaining a new philosophy and ensuring its survival into our own age.

Author Biography

Edith W. Clowes is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Note on Transliteration and Translation	xiii
Abbreviations	xv
Introduction	1	(16)
Part One THE DISPLACEMENT OF PHILOSOPHY (1820's-1860's)
1. The Possibility of a Russian Philosophy: Language and Reader in a New Philosophical Culture (1820's-1830's)	17	(27)
2. Competing Discourses: Philosophy Marginalized	44	(32)
3. The Parting of the Ways: Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, and the Seeds of Russian Philosophical Discourse	76	(27)
Part Two THE BIRTH OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY (1870's-1920's)
4. Philosophical Language between Revelation and Reason: Solovyov's Search for Total Unity	103	(27)
5. Philosophy as Tragedy: Shestov and His Russian Audience	130	(25)
6. Philosophy in the Breach: Rozanov's Philosophical Roguery and the Destruction of Civil Discourse	155	(27)
7. Philosophy as Epic Drama: Berdiaev's Philosophy of the Creative Act	182	(29)
Part Three THE SURVIVAL OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHICAL CULTURE (1920's-1950's)
8. Image and Concept: Losev's "Great Synthesis of Higher Knowledge" and the Tragedy of Philosophy	211	(24)
9. The Matter of Philosophy: Dialectical Materialism and Platonov's Quest after Questioning	235	(23)
10. "Sheer Philosophy" and "Vegetative Thinking": Pasternak's Suspension and Preservation of Philosophy	258	(24)
Conclusion	282	(7)
Appendix: The Generations and Networks of Russian Philosophy	289	(2)
Index	291