Join SEELC for the 2023 Oulanoff Memorial Lecture: “Russia’s First Anti-Imperialist Novel: Vasilii Narezhnyi’s The Black Year, or the Mountain Princes”. This year's talk will be given by Dr. Harsha Ram (University of California - Berkeley).
Dinner will be served at 5:00pm. The talk will begin at 5:45pm.
Abstract:
The Russophone Ukrainian novelist Vasilii Narezhnyi (1780-1825) visited Tbilisi, Georgia in 1802, working for one year in the newly established Russian administration. In doing so he became entangled in one of the most pivotal moments in the modern history of the Caucasus: the Russian annexation of Kartli-Kakheti. Narezhnyi’s Caucasian sojourn would ultimately serve as the stimulus for his future novel Chernyi god, ili gorskie kniazia, most likely written in St. Petersburg during the 1810s but published only posthumously in 1829. The first sustained work of Russian literature to be set in the Caucasus, The Black Year unfolds in a small principality in North Ossetia during what appears to be the early modern era. The rambling account of a Caucasian princeling consumed by his quest to affirm, maintain or regain power, the novel was perceived as an attack on the very foundations of Russian autocracy and rejected for publication. When it was finally published, the novel was dismissed as artistically flawed and out of date. Untimely and never assimilated into the Russian literary canon, Narezhnyi’s book draws on diverse sources - from the Fürstenspiegel and the conte oriental to the folk traditions of the Ukrainian Baroque - to produce a grotesque yet enigmatic satire whose allegorization of sovereignty, both Russian and Caucasian, has yet to be fully understood.
