You are warmly invited to a two-day symposium on “The Weird Russian 19th Century,” hosted by the Russian and East European Program at Rutgers University. Note the three panels on “Weird Dostoevsky”! Register for each day of the symposium at the links below.
The Weird Russian 19th Century
Friday, April 28, 2023
Registration link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcqcOiqqjkrE9Y45mSEX9MtDD59Ydzh9T7T
10:00 Welcome (Co-organizers: Arpi Movsesian and Chloë Kitzinger, Rutgers University)
10:15-12:15 Panel 1: Anxiety, Periphery, Soul
Luyang Zhou (Zhejiang University): The Eastern Borderlands in Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina
Ayesha Suhail (Aligarh Muslim University): Murder, Madness and the Absurdity of
Kreutzer Sonata
Intizor Gulyamova (Stony Brook University): The Heirs of Doom: Gogol’s and
Turgenev’s tormented heroes break through fin de race
Elizabeth J. Wenger (Iowa State University): Anxiety, Animal Instincts, and the Dark
Forest: An EcoGothic Reading of Leonid Andreyev’s “The Abyss”
12:15-1:15 Lunch Break
1:15-2:45 Panel 2: Weird Dostoevsky I (Undergraduates from Rutgers University)
Anna Lasek: Schisms and Perception: The Way into the “Porog”
Ilona Lyakhovsky: TBD
May Zheng: Reality in Flux and Conflict: Meta-Theater in Notes from the House of the
Dead and Hamlet
Evan Zilber: Rodion Romanovich and Dorian Gray: A Question of Extraordinaries
2:45-3:00 Break
3:00-4:00 Keynote: Jacob Emery (Indiana University)
Saturday, April 29, 2023
Registration link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rdOiprT8sE9F9JnTCyKcC6V0RqOTpoyjO
10:00-11:45 Panel 3: Ghosts, Women, Tsars
Chloe Papadopoulos (Dalhousie University): A Tsar Unfit to Rule: “Prirodnaia
nesposobnost'” in Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s Tsar Fedor Ioannovich
Sophie Bradley (Lehigh University): Reading Women Through Sentimentalism
Brett Donohoe (Harvard University): Sensual Specters: The Erotics of
Haunting in Romantic Verse
11:45-12:45 Lunch Break
12:45-2:30 Panel 4: Weird Dostoevsky II
Greta Matzner-Gore (University of Southern California): Weird Dostoevsky (the 1860s)
Arpi Movsesian (Rutgers University): Dostoevsky’s Female Fools and “Urodlivyi” Laughter
Brian Egdorf (Kehillah Jewish High School): Can’t Say Gay, Can’t Say Murder: The
Strange Discussions Between Porfiry Petrovich and Raskolnikov
2:45-3:00 Break
3:00-4:45 Panel 5: Weird Dostoevsky III
Alina Wyman (New College of Florida): Off-Center but On Point: Eccentricity in
Dostoevsky
Ani Abrahamyan (Indiana University): Of Faith and Rationality: Beheadings in
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Writing
Peter Gregory Winsky (University of Southern California): The Strange World of
Dostoevsky’s Orthodox Ontology: Demons and Cosmic Consciousness in the
Late Novels
With questions, please contact movsesian@greell.rutgers.edu and chloe.kitzinger@rutgers.edu .