Turgenev’s Modern Pastoral: Peasants and the Struggle with Modernity in Russian Realism

Join us for another installment of the 19v seminar.

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom meeting: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/99102207490. 

This talk will explore how the pastoralism of Notes from a Hunter neither ignores history nor gives up on the nostalgic dream of frozen time as it moves between poles of dynamism and repose and struggles with the relentless expectations of progress together with the complacency of self-acceptance. While characters battling against the past and dissatisfied with the present become the material for Turgenev’s later novels, the pastoral present, a temporal position alternating between energy and repose, shapes Turgenev’s mature narrative in response to the problem of freedom raised by the exploration of peasant life.