The Three-Dimensional Heroine: The Intertextual Relationship Between Three Sisters and Hedda Gabler

This article reads Chekhov's play Three Sisters as a response to Ibsen's Hedda Gabler through an examination of the plays' possible intertextual relationship. The author discusses the historical context of both plays as well as their textology and staging directions

Haunted Ice, Fearful Sounds, and the Arctic Sublime: Exploring Nineteenth-Century Polar Gothic Space

This article considers a unified polar Gothic as a way of examining texts set in Arctic and Antarctic space. Through analysis of Coleridge's' The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', Shelley's Frankenstein, and Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , the author creates a framework for understanding polar Gothic, which includes liminal space, the supernatural, the Gothic sublime, ghosts and apparitions, and imperial Gothic anxieties about the degradation of 'civilisation'. Analysing Verne's scientific-adventure novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) with this framework, the author contextualises the continued public interest in the lost Franklin expedition and reflects on nineteenth-century polar Gothic anxieties in the present day. Polar space creates an uncanny potential for seeing one's own self and examining what lies beneath the surface of one's own rational mind

The Fall of the House: Gothic Narrative and the Decline of the Russian Family

This book chapter examines the Gothic trope of the "fall of the house" across the Russian long nineteenth-century canon, focusing on Aksakov's A Family Chronicle, Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Family Golovlyov, and Bunin's Dry Valley

Unpacking Viazemskii's Khalat: The Technologies of Dilettantism in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Literary Culture

This article explores the image of the khalat, or dressing gown, in and around Petr Viazemskii's 1817 poem “Proshchanie s khalatom” (Farewell to My Dressing Gown). As the poem circulated during the period between its creation and printing, its central image—the khalat—became enshrined as a symbol for early nineteenth-century literary culture around and within the Arzamas circle, emphasizing a creative inner life and an informal approach to writing. The poem mediates between friendship, honor, authenticity, and authorship and the formalities, duties, and expectations of society life. The khalat image appears in later poems, correspondence, and occasional writings by Anton Del'vig, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Vasilii Zhukovskii, among others. Tracing the image through its intertextual influences, extratextual impact, and memetic evolution, I examine the way it contributed to the development of an intellectual network through information transfer during the early nineteenth century and beyond

Anxiety and Visual Discriminations in Undergraduates

Mathematics tests were used to create anxiety in undergraduates. Heart rates were recorded as a measure of anxiety. Following each mathematics test, participants completed a different visual discrimination tasks, Stroop Colored Word Tests, Where’s Waldo Puzzles, and IQ Matching Tests. Reaction times and accuracy were measured for each task. The hypothesis was that those with more difficult mathematics tests would have longer reaction times and be less accurate. The results of the study suggest that mathematics anxiety did not have a significant effect on reaction times for any task, and was only significant for the accuracy of the IQ matching tests

Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1854

From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Russia was transformed from a moderate-sized, land-locked principality into the largest empire on earth. How did systems of information and communication shape and reflect this extraordinary change? Information and Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 brings together a range of contributions to shed some light on this complex question. Communication networks such as the postal service and the gathering and circulation of news are examined alongside the growth of a bureaucratic apparatus that informed the government about its country and its people. The inscription of space is considered from the point of view of mapping and the changing public ‘graphosphere’ of signs and monuments. More than a series of institutional histories, this book is concerned with the way Russia discovered itself, envisioned itself and represented itself to its people. Innovative and scholarly, this collection breaks new ground in its approach to communication and information as a field of study in Russia. More broadly, it is an accessible contribution to pre-modern information studies, taking as its basis a country whose history often serves to challenge habitual Western models of development. It is important reading not only for specialists in Russian Studies, but also for students and non-Russianists who are interested in the history of information and communications

“If You Want the History of a White Man, You Go to the Library”: Critiquing Our Legacy, Addressing Our Library Collections Gaps

In 1864, the same year the University of Denver was founded by John Evans, then the Territorial Governor of Colorado and the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, a group of U.S. militia attacked and killed vulnerable members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations at Sand Creek. Using Critical Race Theory and the feminist “ethic of care,” we critique our collections in terms of the Massacre and absent Native American voices, in order to develop a collecting philosophy and direction to acknowledge and address the gaps, and to formulate strategies for teaching students to interrogate a predominately white institutional archive to give voice to the absent or silenced

The City Through a Glass, Darkly: Use of the Gothic in Early Russian Realism

This article examines works by Grigorovich, Dal′, Grebenka, Nekrasov, and Dostoevskii from the period 1845–49, looking at the way these early realists represented St Petersburg. Broadly, they sought to depict life with verisimilitude and experimented with new methods to achieve this aim, adapting earlier literary models such as the physiological sketch and the gothic. Despite differing artistic styles, these writers used the gothic in surprisingly similar ways. The article argues that realism accommodated the gothic as a tool to underscore social concerns surrounding urban poverty as well as build up narrative force in otherwise descriptive passages

Through the Opaque Veil: The Gothic and Death in Russian Realism

This chapter examines nineteenth-century Russian writers who drew on the Gothic in order to explore the experience of death, existential terror, and the possibility of an afterlife within the bounds of literary realism. In Turgenev’s story ‘Bezhin Meadow’ and Chekhov’s sketch ‘A Dead Body’, Gothic language and imagery create a narrative frame that contextualizes an encounter between peasants and a traveller focused around a discussion of death. This chapter argues that the Gothic is juxtaposed with folk belief in these works, to underscore that both the peasants’ dvoeverie and educated Russia’s interest in natural sciences, materialist philosophy, and the pseudo-science of spiritualism represent attempts to systematise and explain the unknown. The Gothic mediates the tension between science and faith, the irrational and the prosaic, and the abject and the mysterious, while allowing these ruminations to remain ambiguously unfinalised for the reader

Plotting the ending: generic expectation and the uncanny epilogue of Crime and Punishment

This article examines the epilogue of Dostoevskii’s novel Crime and Punishment from the perspective of genre and generic expectation. Considering two generic plots that appear in the novel, the detective plot and the redemption narrative, the author argues that the imagined reader’s generic expectation is both satisfied and thwarted in each case. The author introduces the idea of “generic stasis” to refer to Raskol'nikov’s situation vis-à-vis generic plot in each plot trajectory of the epilogue. In upsetting generic expectation, this state of generic stasis creates an opening that enables the novel’s ending to occur. In this sense, the article argues for the utility of the epilogue’s generic hybridity in resisting narrative pre-determination