The Image of the Seminarian in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

Abstract

National literature has long been considered a reflection of a state’s significance andlegitimacy; indeed, fiction participates in and contributes to the myth of the nation. As Benedict Anderson has shown, national literature helps shape the nation. In his scholarship, he defines the nation as an imagined community of people who seem to represent a homogenous group despite the actual inequality and diversity of the population. In line with Anderson, Sarah Corse remarks that a nation is “marked by a distinctive set of values, tensions, myths, and psychological foci, that produces in turn a certain readily identifiable national character.” Julia Wright argues that national literature becomes one of the most effective spreaders of such images. However, instead of portraying a nation as a heterogeneous and diverse community of various social classes, religions, and cultures, national literature deprives the population of its diversity and its complexities. The Russian writers of the 1830s onward struggled to define “Russianness” and Russian identity, and their debates on the subject took place through the medium of their fiction. Preoccupied with probing the essence of “Russianness,” literary elites began to examine national “types,” giving particular attention to the nation’s nascent middle classes: merchants, governesses, teachers, and seminarians. The lattermost, seminarians, would come to constitute a complex source of Russianness. Though eventually ascended to a place among the Russian intelligentsia, their origins were of the middle classes. Reflecting the tensions and social upheaval inherent in the rise of Russia’s new middle-class estate, the portrayal of seminarians in the literature of the day was often of a disparaging tone. In spite of this, the significance of the marginalized estate continued to its rise to prominence in the nineteenth century. The evolution in depictions of seminarians in Russian literature throughout the period reflects the course of public opinion, with some significant exceptions. This thesis analyzes selected works by two influential writers of the period, Gogolʹ’s Vii (1835) and Khvoshchinskaia’s The Baritone (1859). These works were chosen due to their extensive and opposing descriptions of seminarians. Close reading of these selected works allows one to scrutinize the shift in image of seminarians in Russian literature and culture between 1830 and 1860. Chapter I of this thesis delves into Nikolai Gogolʹ’s novella and explores how the writer depicted seminarians in demeaning and derogatory terms and examines the characteristics he ascribes to these students. Accordingly, this thesis posits that Gogolʹ illustrated a perceived clash between the seminarians’ expected religiosity and their failure to meet these expectations via their personal behavior. Chapter II will then investigate a depiction of the estate as portrayed by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia (pseudonym V. Krestovskii) in The Baritone, written two decades later. In her work, the estate is portrayed in an arguably idealized manner, reflecting the shift in seminarians’ image as they increasingly came to be viewed as a reflection of potential futures for a changing Russian society. Thus, it becomes possible to trace certain changes in the portrayal of the seminarians against the backdrop of the historical events.