Research
A Revolutionary Gospel
A Revolutionary Gospel: Secular Transpositions of Orthodox Narrative and the Post-Christian Coming of the New Soviet Person (1892-1917) [Expected May 2024]
Summary
This dissertation examines how Maksim Gor'kii (Maxim Gorky) and other Russo-Soviet writers attempted to translate the Orthodox Christian culture of the Russian Empire into a vision for a future secular socialist superpower. Initial literary success lead Gor'kii to great prominance among Lenin and other Bolsheviks, but Gor'kii's elaborately crafted "post-Christian" world was not realized in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, consequential historical and conceptual developments as a result of this work remain to be explored. Through an examination of his and others' biblically-inspired literature, A Revolutionary Gospel attempts to show Gor'kii's ingenuity in bridging two worlds using humans' universal spiritual tendences and how shared narratives steer individual, social, ethical, and intellectual change of all kinds.
Chapters
Introduction: "The Beginning at the End of the (Old) World"
Chapter 1: "Confronting Evil with Inverted Christian Narratives"
Chapter 2: "Factories of Worship: Rebuilding God after 1905"
Chapter 3: "The Socialist Synod of Bazarov, Gor’kii, and Lunacharskii"
Chapter 4: "Canonizing the Worker in a Post-Christian Hagiography"
Chapter 5: "Problematizing a Post-Christian Apocalyptic Christ"
Chapter 6: "Uncovering Symbolic Semantic Networks in Literature"
"Mapping Imagined Geographies of Revolutionary Russia 1914-1922" (MAPRR)
MAPRR is a project about the imagined geographies of the Russian Revolution as told by professional and amateur poets and writers of 1914-1922 in the Russian Empire, RSFSR, and USSR. MAPRR's PI is Edith Clowes. MAPRR was co-created by the University of Virginia's Institute for Technology in the Humanities (IATH).
More information about my MAPRR research
Last modified: Mon Nov 27 2023