Improvising empire: Literary accounts from the Russian and Austrian borderlands, 1862--1923

This dissertation explores attempts by Russian and Austrian authors to articulate a modern imperial identity and to write within an imperial, rather than national, literary canon. It is structured around close readings of literary texts from the 1860s to the 1920s that stage encounters with Russia's western provinces and Austria's eastern lands, a contiguous border region distinguished by its ethnic, linguistic, and religious variety. The central concern of this dissertation is how the shifting, improvisational expressions of identity in these decidedly non-canonical borderland tales complicate, challenge, and sometimes reinforce the grand narratives and myths of Russian, German, and Austrian identity expressed in the Russian and German literary canons.;Chapter One opens with the inauguration of the St. Petersburg-Warsaw Railroad on the eve of the 1863 Polish Uprising. A comparison of two travel accounts, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions and Nikolai Leskov's From a Travel Diary, reveals two models of Russian identity—one distinctly national, the other pragmatic and imperial—that are both generated by the figure of the border.;Chapter Two treats the erotics of the Galician borderlands in the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The discussion explores the multilingual play of the novella Venus in Furs, and draws connections both to the author's self-presentation as a quintessentially Austrian multiethnic subject and to his attempts at creating a multinational Austrian literature after the military defeat by Prussia at Königgrätz in 1866.;Chapter Three turns to Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky's account of the disintegration of the Russian Empire from 1917-1922 and reads his wartime memoir A Sentimental Journey alongside theoretical writings as an effort to revivify the empire from its peripheries. Shklovsky also casts a defamiliarizing eye on the Russian literary canon, revealing it to be a product of encounters between Russian and non-Russian peoples on the empire's margins.;By comparing the literary production of two of Europe's contiguous multiethnic empires, this dissertation aims to enrich and complicate national literary histories, while also exploring how Russian and Austrian imperial literary culture engaged with the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe.