The shaved man’s burden: The Russian novel as a romance of internal colonisation

In hindsight we can see that breakthroughs and stagnations in international Russian Studies have mirrored political crises and cultural turmoil in Russia. With the exhaustion of post-Soviet enthusiasm, the crisis of Russian Studies has become apparent in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in the West. Manifestations of this include the disintegration of academic structures in Russia, reduced public interest in the West, over-concentration on the great authors of the past and severed connections with contemporary society, as well as perceptions of cultural impasse, intellectual decline and a lack of and longing for leadership. It is clear that specialisation has reached its imaginable limits when authorial mascots are adopted as the basis for scholarly identity. Pushkin Studies, Dostoevsky Studies, Nabokov Studies, etc., have become the dominant spheres of activity. Russian philology has diverged from History and the Social Sciences to an extent that would have surprised even our Formalist forebears, to say nothing about our Marxist ones. An interest in theory, which might provide a language for public dialogue between specialists in various subject areas, is often regarded as an external, ʼnon-professional’ distraction from the monographic studies of the great authors. Russianists rarely respond to the problems and approaches that engage scholars in other fields of literary scholarship, say, in American or French Studies. With notable exceptions, interdisciplinary and comparative methodologies have been rarely practised in Russian Studies. Deconstruction, Post-colonial Studies, the pragmatic turn in Philosophy, New Historicism in literary studies and the linguistic turn in Historiography have all had little influence on researchers of Russian literature.