פרסומים

Vladimir Pecherin (1807-1885), a Russian political emigré and Catholic convert was a controversial figure both in nineteenth-century Ireland and in Russian intellectual history. In his autobiographical notes and in the letters to his Russian corespondents of the 1860s and the 1870s, eventually collected in Apologia pro vita mea (Mémoires d'outre-tombe), Pecherin provides a vivid display of the evolution of Russian thought. His writings as a whole constitute an artistic presentation of the Russian Zeitgeist. Certain glaring contradictions between the ideas expressed in Pecherin's Russian correspondence and the reality of his long life within the Catholic Church require explanation. The article focuses on the authorial intention behind Pecherin’s autobiographical writing. In the hope of cementing his connection with Russia, Pecherin created in his memoirs the largely stock literary image of a “superfluous man,” a dominant literary figure of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Pecherin’s practical activity within the Catholic Church was, however, by no means superfluous, as his reputation in Dublin attests. Pecherin’s epistles to Russia invert the genre of  “confession of conversion” and form a “confession of disillusionment.” Pecherin’s “hero” writes a repentant story in which he recounts a life-long pattern of devotion to various deceptive illusions, among which he counts Socialism, Hegelianism, as well as Catholicism and religion in general. The constant reinventions of himself are matched by surprising flexibility of his literary style, which seems to imitate the major voices of Russian classic literature, from Karamzin and Dostoevsky to Turgenev. If we acknowledge that Pecherin’s memoirs are primarily a work of art and only then a source of historically accurate information, many of his apparent contradictions are explained.

June 2004: Kay Young is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy, a study of narrative intimacy and happiness. Currently, she is writing a book called Coming to Consciousness: Mind, Body, Emotion and the 19th-Century English Novel.

In recent years, focus on issue of the spatial has increased exponentially. Briefly charting this rise in its various theoretical forms, we may locate a common theme within many of the positions taken up in response to the spatial: a concern with turmoil and oppression, and with a shifting of both physical and political boundaries. Nowhere is this concern more explicit than in the post-colonial response to what may be seen as the most violent violation of space: the colonial appropriation of land and territory as part of the various imperial projects of previous centuries. In post-colonial writing the colonial space is acknowledged, rejected for its inauthenticity and then re-made. A detailed reading of a particular text – Ben Okri’s Infinite Riches – and of a particular space within this text – the city – allows us to exemplify some of the narrative strategies by which such a powerful reclaiming of space may be asserted by the post-colonial author.