Author Description

Introduction: the fin-de-siècle mood in Russian literature / Ani Kokobobo and Katherine Bowers -- Anxieties of disintegration. The Russian rougon-Macquart: degeneration and biological determinism in The Golovlev family / Kate Holland; The hiding places of the self in Dostoevsky's Adolescent / Yuri Corrigan; A childhood's garden of despair: Dostoevsky and "A boy at Christ's Christmas party" / Robin Feuer Miller; The railway and the elemental force: slavophilism, pan-slavism, and apocalyptic anxieties in Anna Karenina / Alexander Burry and S. Ceilidh Orr -- Destabilizing gender and sexuality. "Mister Russian beast": civilization's discontents in Turgenev / Emma Lieber; Masculine degeneration in Dostoevsky's Demons / Connor Doak; The burden of superfluity: reconsidering female heroism in Chekhov's The seagull / Jenny Kaminer -- Generic experimentation and hybridity. The fall of the house: Gothic narrative and the decline of the Russian family / Katherine Bowers; Corpses of desire and convention: Tolstoy's and Artsybashev's grotesque realism / Ani Kokobobo; The little man in the overcoat: Gogol and Krzhizhanovsky / Muireann Maguire; Icons, eclipses, and stepping off the train: Vladimir Korolenko and the ocherk / Jane Costlow -- Facing death and decay. Decadent ecosystems in Uncle Vanya: a chorographic mediation / Thomas Newlin; The mute body: Leonid Andreev's abject realism / Edith W. Clowes; The thinking oyster: Turgenev's "drama of dying" as the decay of Russian realism / Ilya Vinitsky -- Afterword: on the potential of ends / Caryl Emerson