{"title":"Contagion and Disgust in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children","authors":"Giulia Dossi","doi":"10.1016/j.ruslit.2022.09.004","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The dualistic pairs of romanticism/rationalism and nature/science have traditionally shaped readings of Turgenev’s <em>Fathers and Children</em>. This article, building on affect theory and theories of the grotesque, examines Bazarov as a character who does not fit into either model. As an outsider, he represents a threat of infection to all the other characters in the novel. His excessive, animalistic life force elicits disgust in those surrounding him and forces them to distance themselves from him for fear of a “life contagion,” which would insert an uncontrollable, repulsive life-energy into their predictable genteel existence. Additionally, Bazarov is characterized by a grotesque affective system, that is, he experiences feelings that are contradictory and elude a definitive reading, right up to the novel’s end. After being exposed to his ambiguous and incongruous feelings, the other characters are at risk of “affective contagion”: they might start experiencing feelings as grotesquely as Bazarov does. This trend towards ambiguity rather than legibility defies the expectations of clarity in psychological prose that critics at the time demanded and that readers have been taught to look for. This article thus proposes pervasive illegibility of character as a previously unidentified trait of Russian Realism, and uses <em>Fathers and Children</em>’s Bazarov as a vivid case study.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":43192,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347922000916","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, SLAVIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The dualistic pairs of romanticism/rationalism and nature/science have traditionally shaped readings of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. This article, building on affect theory and theories of the grotesque, examines Bazarov as a character who does not fit into either model. As an outsider, he represents a threat of infection to all the other characters in the novel. His excessive, animalistic life force elicits disgust in those surrounding him and forces them to distance themselves from him for fear of a “life contagion,” which would insert an uncontrollable, repulsive life-energy into their predictable genteel existence. Additionally, Bazarov is characterized by a grotesque affective system, that is, he experiences feelings that are contradictory and elude a definitive reading, right up to the novel’s end. After being exposed to his ambiguous and incongruous feelings, the other characters are at risk of “affective contagion”: they might start experiencing feelings as grotesquely as Bazarov does. This trend towards ambiguity rather than legibility defies the expectations of clarity in psychological prose that critics at the time demanded and that readers have been taught to look for. This article thus proposes pervasive illegibility of character as a previously unidentified trait of Russian Realism, and uses Fathers and Children’s Bazarov as a vivid case study.
期刊介绍:
Russian Literature combines issues devoted to special topics of Russian literature with contributions on related subjects in Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak and Polish literatures. Moreover, several issues each year contain articles on heterogeneous subjects concerning Russian Literature. All methods and viewpoints are welcomed, provided they contribute something new, original or challenging to our understanding of Russian and other Slavic literatures. Russian Literature regularly publishes special issues devoted to: • the historical avant-garde in Russian literature and in the other Slavic literatures • the development of descriptive and theoretical poetics in Russian studies and in studies of other Slavic fields.