From Pushkin to Popular Culture

Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy was Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian and Chair of the Slavic Department at Barnard College and Director of the Harriman Institute (2001-2009).  Her scholarly interests included Pushkin, nineteenth-century journals, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Russian ballet, and literary and political developments in post-Soviet Russia.  Emily D. Johnson is Brian and Sandra O’Brien Presidential Professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma. She works on twentieth and twenty-first century Russian culture. Most recently, she co-edited the volume Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (Indiana University Press, 2022) with Alan Barenberg. Irina Reyfman is Professor of Russian Literature at Columbia University. The focus of her work is interaction of literature and culture. She is the author and editor of several books, including How Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Tables of Rank (The University of Wisconsin Press: 2016; paperback 2021). Carol R. Ueland is Professor Emerita at Drew University. Her scholarly works are on Russian poetry and translation, women’s studies and biograpy.  Her most recent book is Literary Biographies in the Lives of Remarkable People Series, co-edited with Ludmilla A. Trigos (Lexington Books, 2022).

Introduction: Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy as a Scholar of Russian Culture 

Emily D. Johnson, Irina Reyfman, and Carol Ueland 




Part 1. Pushkin, Pushkin, Pushkin, and Katkov 




1. The Poet, History, and the Supernatural: A Note on Pushkin’s “The Poet” and The Bronze Horseman
2. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: A Curious Case of Cultural Cross-Fertilization?
3. A Note on Curiosity in Pushkin’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great
4. Katkov and the Emergence of the Russian Messenger





Part 2. Russia and the West




5. Jane Austen in Russia: Hidden Presence and Belated Boom

6. King, Queen, Sui-Mate: Nabokov’s Defense against Freud’s “Uncanny”

7. “Imperially, My Dear Watson”: Sherlock Holmes and the Decline of the Soviet Empire




Part 3. The Soviet/Post-Soviet Experience




8. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago: The Resurrection of the Living Past

9. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Its Intertexts: Aksakov’s “Stepan Mikhailovich’s Good Day” and Kataev’s Time Forward!

10. Koshkin Dom: Following the Golden Shoelace

11. Tatiana Tolstaia: The Text of Family and the Family in the Text—Genealogy, Gender, and the Rhetoric of Lineage 




Part 4. Russian Culture, High and Low




12. Dance as Metaphor: The Russian Ballerina and the Imperial Imagination

13. The Blockbuster Miniseries on Soviet TV: Isaev-Shtirlits, the Ambiguous Hero of Seventeen Moments in Spring

14. Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv




Selected Publications by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy




Index