Invisible forces: Capitalism and the Russian literary imagination, 1855--1881 (Ivan Goncharov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

The reign of Alexander II (1855-1881) marked an unparalleled era of debate regarding the future of Russian society. What course should the country pursue for its social, economic and political development? How closely should Russia emulate the West and to what extent should it seek its own path? Questions such as these compelled Russians to imagine new economic and social arrangements.; This study examines the connections between classical political economy and fiction-making during this introspective period in Russian history. The emergence of political economy as a model social science created a new language in which philosophers tried to make sense of the radical changes that accompanied the rise of capitalism. The world imagined by Adam Smith and his successors provided an epic stage for economic life and populated that stage with profit-seeking actors. It took ready-made categories such as money, labor and exchange and imparted to them new meaning. It was a world filled with invisible forces that would guarantee the social welfare by virtue of a self-regulating market. In short, the great economists took a signifier---"the economy"---and pointed it to a new signified of their own making.; My study investigates when and how this new sense of the economy becomes activated in the Russian novel. In close readings of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov [1859] and Fedor Dostoevsky's Idiot [1867], I compare two divergent strategies for dealing with the question of Russia's economic modernization. Goncharov, I argue, pursues a strategy of synthesis, whereby the story of Oblomov and Stolz is used to highlight an era of epic economic change that can be made consistent with Russian history and values. In contrast, Dostoevsky's Idiot uses the modernizing economy to craft a cautionary tale of spiritual alienation and moral apocalypse. The emerging capitalist economy becomes the flash point against which the medieval values of Russian Orthodoxy and the redemptive power of Christianity are contrasted through the trope of the gift. Drawing on the theory of fictional worlds, I examine how the worldmaking grammar of political economy informs the aesthetic strategy of two early novels that explore the theme of economic modernization.