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Today Robin Feuer Miller sat down with Barbara Henry to discuss her book, Tales from the Netherworld: The Katabasis in Russian Literature, which came out with Northern Illinois University Press this month.
RFM: Congratulations, Barbara, on what is an extraordinary book: you manage to carry out extensive scholarship on a range of writers, genres, and time periods; yet each chapter contains meticulous close reading as well. And, perhaps most surprising of all, the book is a page turner! You even begin with a terrific and chillingly relevant joke. Can you tell us a bit about that? When you first heard the joke did you think you might use it for the opening of a book sometime in the future?
BH: I remember hearing the joke about Yeltsin’s going to Hell in either 1994 or 1995, while doing research in Petersburg and Moscow for my doctoral dissertation. American versions of the joke typically involve someone’s going to Heaven and asking St. Peter if they can make a call home to Texas or Vermont or similar, which is so close to Heaven that it’s a “local call.” The Russian version, in which a call to Moscow from Hell is also local, is funnier, and offers a glimpse of the comic resilience necessary in those precarious and difficult years. Underworld stories, which trade in sudden irruptions of the weird and possibly supernatural into the familiar and real, were particularly appropriate to the unhinged character of the Yeltsin years, when underworlds of many varieties emerged into daylight life. Remember those marketplaces that began to appear in underground pedestrian crossings? Those subterranean crossings offered a traditional aspect of underground spaces as shelter, but in the 90s, they became their own little economic ecosystems. Grannies lined the steps selling loaves of bread. There were buskers and beggars, kiosks selling clothes, food, drinks, and books. At that one underground crossing on Arbat Square and Kalininsky Prospekt, there were people selling puppies and kittens they’d bundle into their winter coats, so you’d see little animal heads peeking out of people’s collars. These underground worlds seethed with a desperate life, as people tried to find their way through the reverberating chaos of the world above. Space in these podzemnye perekhody probably depended on paying off someone in the criminal underworld, too. The underworld was right there in Moscow, but it was not Hell; it was something both strange and familiar, a way station to somewhere else.
RFM: I have to confess! I needed to look up the word “katabasis.” Possibly others might too, so could you give a quick, handy definition of it before we go further in our conversation?
BH: Strictly speaking, a katabasis is a descent, understood in the literary sense as a descent to the underworld, a key stop on the heroic journey. But almost as soon as you define it, questions arise. Is Odysseus’s visiting Hades a katabasis if he actually sails over Ocean and makes blood offerings at Hades’ entrance? Isn’t that a nekyia, a summoning of ghosts? Is Gilgamesh’s journey really a katabasis if he doesn’t make a descent, and there don’t seem to be any, well, dead people, in the place he visits? There’s no normative model of a katabasis, even in the literary works that supposedly codified it. I define it as a journey in which the protagonist meets death in its own kingdom. Which might be underground, or in the forest, or even in your own head. Or mine. Definitely mine.
RFM: I already alluded to the unusually wide-ranging aspect of your book, whether through time, genre, or space. At the same time, you had to make difficult choices, for example, in the first two chapters on the magic tale and the memorate, how did you choose one version of a tale or memorate over another? What was something you had to leave out that you wished you could include?
BH: The chapters on folktales were a challenge, and not only because folklore and folk literature are disciplines in their own right, and have methodologies quite distinct from the study of modern literature. Folktales themselves straddle ancient and modern worlds and literatures, and because of this longevity, I was interested in the kind of transformations that they exhibit, not just in terms of their plots, where transformations are part and parcel of magic tales in particular, but in their forms. I believe that katabatic narratives not only mark historical changes in the world without, but generate formal change in the literary works that they inhabit. I focused on the best-known versions of a particular tale, not only because they’d likely be known to a reader, but because the most widely-reprinted versions of a tale are that way because they themselves are poised between tradition and the innovation that the katabasis generates. This was easier to do with a magic tale like “The Magic Swan-Geese” (“Gusi-lebedi,” 113), which conflates characters in a way that is entirely unlike other tales of its type. Those differences in a given story to our idea of what a magic tale should look like are the very things that suggest a katabatic influence.
It is also challenging to work with the memorate, best known now as the “urban legend.” The overlap and interchange between the worlds of the living and the dead are rendered in the memorate as a textual exchange. I looked at memorates that exhibited a particularly marked porosity in their use of literary intertexts, “dead” stories that were dead because they were printed and unchanging, versus the memorate, which weaves in a bit of Gogol’s “The Nose” or Zhukovsky’s “Lyudmila” for its own purposes, animating them in unexpected and ghoulish ways. The memorate is such an interesting form that I wish I could have looked at how they’re operating today online, especially on social media, but this period and mode of circulation was beyond my purview.
RFM: In Chapter 2, “A Local Call: The Memorate,” I was fascinated by your discussion of how Russian peasant cultures distinguished between the benevolent and the malevolent dead, and how there was a belief that the earth would reject the bodies of the “unclean,” so they were often dumped in ravines or exposed in wasteland swamps. It is such a chilling insight, especially as you move forward in your analysis to the Soviet period. But I wondered, too, about the building of St. Petersburg on a swamp? You write compellingly about St. Petersburg as a kind of underworld in several of your chapters, but I was wondering in particular if those engaged in constructing the city experienced something of the uncanny and if it was reflected in either magic tales or memorates of that period.)
BH: I first encountered this idea of the earth as a moral force that rejects evildoers in the film Repentance (Pokayanie, 1984), which I saw in a sweltering Leningrad cinema in the summer of 1988. I’m not aware, though, of memorates on the subject of St. Petersburg’s dead, mostly because a lot of the legends collected by folklorists focus on rural areas, especially on remote regions of the Russian north. I could be mistaken about Petersburg memorates, particularly if they’re circulating today in electronic form. It would be interesting to see if they borrow from Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, and Dostoevsky’s uncanny Petersburg. Maybe the “Petersburg Myth” is itself a memorate, for its collective construction and indelible impress on how we see the living city of St. Petersburg through the eyes of the dead.
RFM: Barbara, each of your chapters takes on so many questions; each is so suggestive of further paths of inquiry. Which chapter was the most challenging for you to write? Which was the one which initially gave you the inspiration for this wonderful book? When did you happen upon your fruitful insight about the significant ways in which the Russian versions of the netherworld tend to be different from the western ones, and how these representations are linked both to political/social upheavals and the evolution of genres as well?
BH: The book is very much intended to be an opening discussion of the katabasis in Russian literature, especially as I’m keenly aware of how much I had to leave out! The most challenging chapter to write was on Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. It’s a strange and difficult book, and not enjoyable to read in the conventional sense – you really feel Chekhov’s struggle with the material, and the weight of the suffering that he witnessed on the prison island. Its generic indeterminacy and dialogue with Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House made Sakhalin Island an essential part of my book, even though Chekhov’s work is nonfiction. Dostoevsky’s novel is probably my book’s lodestar, because it was in those scenes of Goryanchikov’s looking out on the broad steppe and seeing clearly, seeing the world as it was and might be, that linked landscape and ethics for me in the Russian katabasis. Your insights in Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey on the nearly-identical scene in Crime and Punishment, in which Raskol’nikov gazes at the steppe, and “time past merges with time present to create a timeless image out of time” (42) was key to my understanding of the particularities of the Russian katabasis. Temporal disjunctions in plot and language are characteristic of underworlds as far back as Vergil’s Aeneid. But it was your linking time’s overlap to Raskol’nikov’s redemption (and it is a redemption!) that was crucial in elucidating for me the temporal component of the landscape’s expansive, equalizing powers.
The leveling function of the Russian katabasis is evident in the Dead House itself, a prison populated by the empire’s underclass. Goryanchikov’s redemption is inseparable from this communal and demotic Russian katabasis. This is distinct from ancient literature, where only gods, demi-gods, and the divinely gifted make the journey to the underworld. The Russian katabasis is an expression of a kind of secular sobornost’ that enlarges the scope of the underworld descent story and its transformative powers. I think that this is also what gives the Russian literary katabasis its perhaps surprisingly positive value. The connection of katabatic narratives to extraliterary historical events is pretty clear – Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) is very good on this. What’s less obvious is that there are internal literary factors that inform writers’ use of the katabasis. This is not quite the “struggle” (bor’ba) that Formalists proposed as a model of literary evolution, but more like a reckoning with the art of the past, a summoning of it so that it can be both incorporated and dismissed by the artist. We’ve seen this with the rise of the novel and invention of film. Now we’re seeing a proliferation of underworld themes in our contemporary culture because, I think, of the emergence of video games as a new narrative art form. Video games draw on visual, film, and print culture, but they are their own distinct art form, and this is both exciting and anxiety-making for those of us who love traditional arts. Artists in both old and new media will instinctively gravitate to the underworld descent story – one of the oldest that we tell – to understand where they stand in this genealogy of forms.
RFM: One of the many pleasures of reading your book is how you gain the trust of your reader through your knowledge and your sense of humor. For example, while reading your chapter on Pushkin and “The Coffinmaker”, with your insights on decomposition and humor, I found myself thinking about Dostoevsky’s “Bobok.” I turned a page, and there was your take on “Bobok,” that story which Robert Louis Jackson reads so astutely as a kind of symposium. What do you make of the fact that the Coffinmaker undergoes this classic katabatic experience that has all the hallmarks of a religious conversion, but he remains, essentially, completely unchanged by it? Or do I have that right?
BH: Yes! I think I said something about the undertaker’s night journey of the soul amounting to little more than his receiving bad customer feedback. Partly Prokhorov’s katabasis fails due to its singular interiority – everything appears to be collective and communal, but it’s actually just one guy’s bad dream. All that appearance of motion and change comes to a screeching halt, revealing an ending little removed from where it began. It’s the essential principle of farce, in which a tremendous outlay of energy and effort ends with us back at the beginning, but worse off. Gogol’ loves the menacing physics of farce, but as with most things in Russian literature, Pushkin got there first. I imagine Pushkin’s cackling to himself as he moves “The Coffinmaker” to its central place in the Belkin tales, the fulcrum on which the whole thing balances, just like the classical katabasis that falls midway through the epic. I love the way that Pushkin alludes to this classical tradition (I mean, Book 6 of Aeneid may also be “just a dream”), and then just undoes everything that happened. Humor is one of Pushkin’s salient traits as a writer, and “Coffinmaker” reminds us that underworld descent stories can be very, very funny – especially when they’re not our own.
RFM: Your chapter on Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead is, quite simply, a tour de force. I read it so fast, so eagerly, that I had to reread it again more slowly. You had me hooked from the outset when you write of “counterfeits of the real, bodies without souls” and that they are the “creations of the city’s countless reflective surfaces—its canals and rivers, the glittering shop windows” and still, within that same opening paragraph, you write, “The opportunities for crossing from one world to the other are so numerous in St. Petersburg that doubts may emerge as to which is the original city, and which its reflection.” In a word, YES! Yet from there you soon transition to another realm, the “House of the Dead,” the prison in Siberia and to a place where real time, mythic time, real space, and mythic space all collide. You bring your reader into this realm through a deep exploration, a dive, into the many varieties of doubling that exist there. I was particularly struck by how you linked “Akulka’s Husband” back to the primary narrative. Could you elaborate for our blog-readers on this insight?
BH: So many underworld descent stories employ first-person narration in order to convince readers of the veracity of their accounts. But because of this, we have little way of assessing a narrator’s reliability, of knowing how other characters see them. Hence the utility and frequency of the double: a duplicate visible to the reader and the narrator alike. Shishkov, the murderer of “Akulka’s Husband,” is one of Goryanchikov’s doubles by his having committed the same crime: the killing of a wife. It’s by telling Shishkov’s story that Goryanchikov makes his own confession. The deeply buried origin of this confession is apparent through the setting apart of “Akulka’s Husband” by its unique subheading, and its presentation as possibly a dream, possibly something overheard, or possibly something conjured in delirium in the prison hospital. The dream underworld is as old as Gilgamesh, and here it represents the descent to the subconscious mind that replays guilt and trauma over and over again. Although Shishkov appears to narrate the story of his crime, it is Goryanchikov who maintains creative control over it, acting as editor and co-author. He’s also linked to Shishkov’s victim, Akulka, who is as silent and strong-willed as Goryanchikov himself. Through Shishkov’s story, Goryanchikov is identified both with the murderer and the murder victim, subject and object. It’s no accident that in the chapter that follows, after this confession, that Goryanchikov gains a new will to live, a will that seems to surprise him most of all.
RFM: Why are there so few journeys to heaven or paradise in the Russian tradition, or even the Western tradition for that matter? Can you identify a defining difference between the Russian paradise and the Western (for lack of a better word…) one?
BH: I’ve wondered about this myself. I think it’s the static nature of what we imagine to be paradise that does not lend itself to our imaginative sympathies. Vision literature is popular the world over, and I remember reading a Russian one from the early 20th century that described Heaven as a great church, where one attended mass all day. That was fairly terrifying to me, a craven agnostic. Maybe we like a bit of paradise – like Don Quixote’s brief pastoral idyll with the shepherds, or Oblomov’s dream – but then we’ve either got to get back on the road or die. Paradise is only appealing when it’s lost, I guess, or so far in the future that we can put off ever achieving it.
RFM: You begin your book with that trenchant joke. We descend with you into various netherworlds; you then lead us out again to leave us, not with a joke where you began, but with a serious insight that manages to be soberly optimistic: “The Russian literary katabasis is at heart an antidote to despair, a persistent hope that wiser mornings follow darkest nights.” Readers need to go along with you through your chapters to find out why this is true!
BH: I do think that underworld stories are less about death than about life, about our fierce will to live despite our pain and our knowledge of our certain ends. And not just to exist, but to live as fully as we can, while we can. This is one of the great consolations of classical and folkloric underworlds – that they hold out the possibility of change, of communion, of redemption from the worst suffering. I try very hard to remember this, especially in the last decade, when so many of us are grieving and wondering how to live with the weight of the sorrow and loss we encounter day after day, in the larger world and our personal lives. It’s worth looking at the beautiful things people make to remind us of how astonishing we are, how brilliant we can be, even as we are faced with the reality of the terrible suffering that we cause.
RFM: I’ll close with the question I think all your readers will have: Where will you go from here? I wrote down a few more refinements of that question, complete with particular queries, but have deleted them all. It’s your trajectory that is the one we want to have a glimpse of! Thank you again for this terrific book.
BH: Thank you for reading it and commenting so thoughtfully! After rooting around in Russian graveyards for a decade, I’m returning to Jewish studies with a project tentatively called A Berdichev Sheherazad. I’m translating Notes of a Jewish Impresario, the memoirs of a Yiddish actor in tsarist Russia. Avrom Fishzon billed his Yiddish troupe as a “German” operetta company to avoid notice by the tsarist state, which in 1883 had made it mostly illegal to perform in Yiddish. The nature of Fishzon’s accommodations – subterfuge, bribery, desperate appeals to individual state officials, abrupt flight – affect the text itself, which is similarly evasive. He charms and beguiles, inviting us backstage to a theatrical world that has passed into legend. But while we’re looking around, our host vanishes into the Russian night. Where did he go? was one of the questions that initially guided the project, which was going to establish the historical record and compare it to Fishzon’s artful version of it. But since the invasion of Ukraine, travel to Russia is not possible. Without the periodical and archival sources to establish Fishzon’s comings and goings, the memoir has become the basis for a larger examination of the Jewish road story, the Jewish picaresque, with Fishzon its trickster hero. Fishzon well knew that metaphor is more powerful than quotidian reportage, and that acting and theatre are forms of liberation that will always elude capture. Nevertheless, I’m going to give it a try.
BARBARA HENRY is an associate professor and the associate chair of the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses on Russian and Yiddish literature. She is the author of Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama (UW Press) and editor, with Joel Berkowitz, of Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays on Drama, Performance, and Show Business (Wayne State Press). She is an editor of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project blog.
ROBIN FEUER MILLER is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities and Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. She has served on and off as the chair of the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature for many of the last 24 years. A former Dean of Arts and Sciences, Senior Advisor to the Provost for Faculty, Visiting Fellow at St Edmunds Hall (University of Oxford), and a Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author and editor of several books, among them Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator and Reader (Harvard UP); The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (Yale UP), and Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey (Yale, UP). She has also written on Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dickens and Rousseau. She is co-editor of Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace, by Kathryn B. Feuer, and the Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel. Her three current projects are Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the Small of This World, an archival project, Kazuko’s Letters from Japan: Love in a Time of Upheaval, and a diary project based on her childhood diaries from Moscow, 1963. She received the AATSEEL award for contributions to scholarship in February 2026.