Levin Visits Anna: The Iconology of Harlotry

Reader response to Anna Karenina has ranged widely over the years, with some inclined to condemn Tolstoy\u27s heroine categorically as a manipulating female and an immoral adulteress. while others have preferred to see her as a pathetic victim of her society\u27s hypocritical moral code and a noble sacrifice to her own passionate capacity for love.\u27 Whatever our final judgment of her may turn out to be, there can be little argument that Anna Karenina has indeed fallen to a pitifully low moral, spiritual and emotional state by the time she decides to commit suicide near the end of Tolstoy\u27s novel. Addicted to narcotics. psychologically unstable. and pathologically jealous, she has by now become insanely suspicious of her lover Vronsky\u27s every movement. And as her last carriage ride through Moscow makes abundantly clear, Anna is now bitterly cynical, if noc downright nihilistic, about the human condition in general. By smoking cigarettes, taking drugs. practicing birth control and refusing co breastfeed her child, she hardly qualifies. in any event, as the Tolstoyan epitome of feminine virtue or moral goodness

The Karamazov Murder Trial: Dostoevsky\u27s Rejoinder to Compassionate Acquittals

Gary Rosenshield has argued that the miscarriage of justice Dostoevsky depicts in the final book of The Brothers Karamazov, where an innocent man is wrongly convicted in a court of law for a crime he did not commit, may be read as the novelists attempt to dramatize in a work of fiction the strong misgivings about the legal reforms of 1864 that he had expressed in his Diary of a Writer during the mid-1870s. More specifically, Rosenshield argues that the Karamazov trial constitutes Dostoevsky’s novelistic reworking of his own journalistic commentary on two particular jury trials, those of Stanislav Kronenberg and Ekaterina Kornilova, both of which illustrated how Western law was, to Dostoevsky’s mind, standing in the way of Russian justice. My article extends this hypothesis by arguing that the Karamazov trial may also be read as a novelistic reworking of yet another legal case on which Dostoevsky had earlier provided journalistic commentary: the case of Nastasya Kairova, a jealous young actress who was acquitted of premeditated attempted murder in the violent stabbing attack upon her lover’s wife. At her trial, Kairova’s attorney claimed that the defendant was not morally responsible for her actions. He blamed the crime instead on her environment and on the fit of passion [аффект] she suffered at the time, which rendered her temporarily insane. My article argues that the guilty verdict in the Karamazov trial may be read as Dostoevsky’s attempt in a work of fiction to reverse the egregious miscarriage of justice that had been perpetrated in the Kairova case and to send a very different message to his contemporaries about crimes of passion, moral culpability, and compassionate acquittals

Vegetarianism in Russia: The Tolstoy(an) Legacy

The collapse of communist rule in Russia at the beginning of the 1990s revived a whole series of social, cultural, and ideological phenomena that had either lain dormant or been almost entirely absent during the Soviet period, phenomena ranging from pornography and prostitution to religion and real estate. Vegetarianism, which had been demonized under Stalin as a pernicious and insidiously anti-scientific doctrine promulgated by the ideologues of the exploitative classes in the capitalist West, experienced a revival that began during the glasnost\u27 years; it has continued to remain popular in post communist Russia as well. The Vegetarian Society of the USSR, which was created in the late 1980s under Gorbachev, helped to bring together-and, more importantly, to bring out of the proverbial closet-Russian vegetarians of various hues, organizing health groups in different cities across the former Soviet Union

Bonbons and Bolsheviks: The Stigmatization of Chocolate in Revolutionary Russia

This essay examines how and why how the official Party attitude toward chocolate changed rather dramatically during the first two decades of Communist rule. In the immediate aftermath of the October 1917 Revolution, zealous and idealistic Bolsheviks, inspired in part by the ascetic model provided by Lenin himself, condemned chocolate throughout most of the 1920s as a decadent luxury food item that they associated closely with the self-indulgent consumerism and egoistic, philistine way of life enjoyed by their hated class enemy, the bourgeoisie. With the onset of Stalin’s cultural revolution in the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, chocolate suddenly became transformed into a positive symbol of the economic prosperity, material abundance, and cultural progress that the building of socialism, it was claimed, had finally achieved in Soviet Russia. My essay explores some of the reasons not just for the initial Bolshevik stigmatization of chocolate, but also for this dramatic turn around in the way chocolate was perceived subsequently by the Stalinist leadership. The focus is centered mainly on the way chocolate was represented in works of Soviet literature during both decades