ASEEES 2014 Panel: Nikolai Leskov

[Victoria Thorstensson]

Dear SEELANGERS,

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of his first novel, No Way Out,  
we are organizing a panel on Nikolai Leskov for the 2014 ASEEES  
Convention in San Antonio. We are looking for one more presenter, a  
chair, and a discussant. We are especially interested in papers that  
explore Leskov’s work as a polemical novelist, but papers dedicated  
to his journalistic work or short stories are also welcome. One of the  
papers will analyze No Way Out as a polemical and artistic answer to  
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be  
Done? Viewing No Way Out as “mothers and daughters” to  
Turgenev’s “fathers and sons,” the paper shows how Leskov’s  
reinterpretation of the generational conflict through the lens of the  
Woman Question significantly widens our understanding of the debate on  
nihilism in 1860s Russia. Another examines the informers and false  
accusations of being an informer found in Leskov’s fiction.  
Co-existing with the standard condemnations against informing  
widespread in Russian culture and elsewhere, there are morally complex  
and even heroic informers in Leskov, whose works engage, sometimes  
explicitly, with the tragic informer Mazepa in Pushkin’s Poltava.

If you are interested in joining this panel, please send your paper  
topic and a brief abstract to Victoria Thorstensson at  
vit at sas.upenn.edu. If interested in chairing the panel or serving as a  
discussant, send us a brief description of your current academic  
research and/or affiliation. To be included in the panel, please  
respond by January 12.

Victoria Thorstensson
Visiting Fellow, Yale University

Erik McDonald
Independent Scholar

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