Dr. Susanne Klingenstein Lectures

Masterworks of Russian Literature - Part I : The 19^th Century from Pushkin to Chekhov

The following audio files are the full recorded lectures from Dr. Susanne Klingenstein's course currently being held at Temple Emanuel. They are provided as a resource for her students.

October 14, 2010 The High Romanticism of Mikahil Lermontov After Alexander Pushkin was killed in a duel in February 1837, the poet Mikhail Lermontov was recognized as his literary successor. In his 1841 novel "A Hero of Our Time", Lermontov depicts the upper class sensitive young man as social outsider. He is alienated by a society whose insecurities and fear of authority cause it to endorse a mindless conformism.
November 15, 2010 Nikolai Godol: From the Ukraine to St. Petersburg, 1829-1835 The stories Gogol produced upon his arrival in St. Petersurg as a penniless graduate of a provincial military academy used Ukrainian folklore as a marketing ploy. The stories catapulted Gogol to instant fame. Pushkin himself laughed his head off. But the stories are double-edged swords. They are hiding Gogol's deep uneasiness about his buried homosexuality in minutely composed, highly metaphorical narratives that pretend to be nothing but funny social satires.
December 13, 2010 Nikolai Godol: From St. Petersburg to Rome, 1835-1842 The lecture first reviews Gogol's biography from his sudden emergence as a writer in St. Petersburg in 1831 to his last creative spurt in 1842, outlining the history of Gogol's failed friendships with other men. The lecture then walks readers through Gogol's story "The Overcoat" and concludes with a discussion of the structure of Gogol's great novel "Dead Souls". Because of various technical problems during the recording, the beginning and the end of this lecture have been truncated.
February 14, 2011 Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina - Part 1 In 1873, just four years after publishing War and Peace, Tolstoy started serializing Anna Karenina in the conservative periodical The Russian Messenger. Russia's liberal elite was outraged. Turgenev thought Tolstoy had wasted his talent on "piffle;" but Dostoevsky considered the enormous novel a "flawless work of art."In this first session on Anna Karenina, we take the long view and enumerate the enormous variety of themes the novel contains (types of marriages and family life, city versus country, the economics of Russian agriculture, faith, humiliation, redemption). Then we take the first sentence of the novel seriously and develop a possible structure of the book based on the types of families Tolstoy placed in opposition to one another. As we move along in the discussion we highlight many of the carefully constructed literary motives that mark Tolstoy as a superior literary artist.
February 28, 2011 Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina - Part 2 Our second exploration of Anna Karenina takes off from Tolstoy's claim that his novel is a labyrinth of linked ideas. We being with a review of the types of families Tolstoy plays off against each other and then settle on the character of Kitty. She changes from a vapid young girl into a mature empathic woman who can comfort a dying man. Throughout the novel Tolstoy links death and birth; he grants women specific insights into the mystery of the body; and he tries out some of the insights of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work The World as Representation and Idea (1819) had very much impressed Tolstoy as he was beginning to write Anna Karenina. We conclude with a consideration of the role of forgiveness in the character development of Alexei Karenin and assessment of Anna Karenina's suicide not as renunciation but as a defiance.
March 21, 2011 Lev Tolstoy, "Kreutzer Sonata" Sofia Tolstoya, "Who Is to Blame?" Anton Chekhov, "Lady with a Dog" In 1889 Tolstoy wrote the novella "Kreutzer Sonata," one of his most provocative fictions. On a train a discussion erupts about the nature of marital love. One passenger takes over and tells the story of how he came to murder his wife in a fit of jealousy. His diagnosis of his own madness is that addiction to sex is to blame for the deterioration of all marriages, but of his in particular. The story caused a tremendous stir in Moscow and St. Petersburg society. The many autobiographical details caused Tolstoy's wife of 27 years to write down in the form of a novel her own analysis of who or what was to blame for marital discord. Ten years after Tolstoy's wife, Anton Chekhov too, who cherished Tolstoy above all contemporary Russian writers, wrote a reply to "Kreutzer Sonata."
April 11, 2011 Theodor Fontane, Effie Briest (1894/95) Set in the northern German hinterlands and in Berlin in the late 19th century, Fontane's exquisitely crafted realistic novel depicts loveless, solitary life of a very young woman married to her mother's former suitor. Effie Briest resembles both Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina in being a very young, inexperienced and romantically inclined middle-class woman who is crushed by the social conventions that constrict her life. Her inventor however, used a literary technique in depicting her life, that gives his novel a much richer texture than the one we find in the novels by Flaubert and Tolstoy. In this session we are exploring a literary technique that the art historian Erwin Panofsky called "disguised symbolism."
May 16, 2011 Theodor Fontane, Effie Briest (1894/95) - Part 2 In this second session about Fontane's exquisite novel, we examine how Fontane uses his technique of "disguised symbolism" to enhance the psychological realism of the novel. If chapter 1 subtly but consistently presents the heroine Effie as a type of Virgin Mary, how does this work out in the rest of the novel and what argument does Fontane pursue? Fontane is highly unusual in his time to present a consistently empathic view of women. He shows the pressures society imposed on a young upper middle class woman deprived of a useful education and puts her suffering on a par with that of the young Mary/Miriam. More important, however, Fontane also shows what literature can do as high art: it can argue a case on three levels simultaneously and provide intellectual pleasure and stimulation according to the degree of education the reader brings to the novel.
May 16, 2011 Lev Tolstoy, The Writings of the 1880s After Tolstoy finished Anna Karenina in 1879, he fell into a deep spiritual crisis. He tried to master it by writing three religious works (Confession, A Critique of Dogmatic Theology, and a collation of the four gospels). They amounted to a radical critique of the Russian Orthodox Church, which Tolstoy accused of hypocrisy, distortion and obscurantism. He advocated instead a Christian faith cleansed of all miraculous elements and a life led according to the five moral precepts led out in the "Sermon on the Mount." When Tolstoy returned to Moscow in 1882 after a very long absence, he was shocked by the large number of urban poor caused by Russia's belated industrialization. In his 1886 book "What Then Must We Do?" he includes 14 chapters of stunning urban reportage, painting an unmatched picture of urban poverty in Russia. Finally, in this lecture, the Tolstoy of the 1880s is placed in the context of his fellow writers: the realist Turgenev (dead ind 1883), the spiritual conservative Dostoevsky (dead in 1881), the empathic observer of the little people and the bored middle class Chekhov (dead in 1904), and the rising stars of Yiddish literature who are receptive to Tolstoy's message of the commitment to a moral life.
June 13, 2011 Lev Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (1886) Lev Tolstoy, "Master and Man" (1895) Lev Tolstoy, Resurrection (1899) The last works of Tolstoy are often misread Christianizing works in which Tolstoy's admonishes his readers to follow the moral precepts of laid out in the Gospels. But a close analysis of Tolstoy's late stories and of his last novel Resurrection show that Tolstoy's view of the human condition shared non of Christianity's endemic optimism. The story "Master and Man," in particular, shows human beings thrown into a merciless life that moves inexorably toward death. Salvation, redemption into a transcendent life, is an illusion. When man realizes that he is inevitably going to die and that there is nothing after death, he is gripped by existential terror (strakh) and recognizes that his only salvation is the warmth of his fellow man. The novel Resurrection is a unique depiction of the social realities of late Tsarist Russia with its arbitrary and irrational functioning of the judicial system, the overcrowding of prisons, and the gestation of the revolutionary energies that erupted less than twenty years later. Tolstoy's keen sense of human vanity leads him to recognize the selfish motivation of the revolutionaries. Goodness, he shows, is to acknowledge who you are as a human being, to assess your own potential and then to put your potential unselfishly at the service of your fellow man.