Poetic autobiography in Russian literature: Turgenev, Bunin, Nabokov, Sokolov

In this dissertation, I consider works by Turgenev, Bunin, Nabokov and the contemporary writer Sasha Sokolov as examples of a genre which I have called "poetic autobiography." The works considered are not autobiographical in the conventional sense. Rather, they centrally deal with the artist's creativity, conceived heroically, as affording an escape from the dehumanizing forces of history. "Poetic autobiography" represents a form of self-making by the artist, an attempt to establish his individual autonomy. While "poetic autobiography" was a highly self-conscious genre of the greatest literary sophistication, it was not an exercise in literary polish for its own sake: rather, it represented an attempt, especially by Bunin and Nabokov, to establish a realm of artistic and individual freedom that transcended history and its brutality. Thus, poetic autobiography makes large claims about the individual and the individual's power of self-creation. In this thesis, I seek to explore these claims. I first show the origins of "poetic autobiography" in Turgenev, whose works in many ways anticipate modernism and the literary developments of the twentieth century. I then show how this genre comes to its maturity and full development in Bunin's The Life of Arsen'ev and Nabokov's The Gift. Finally, I discuss Sasha Sokolov's Palisandriia as the recipient of this tradition. Sokolov burlesques the idea of the poetic genius and offers a new and compelling view of the artist's relation to history.