“Inscrutable are Your Destinies, O Russian Censorship!”: Unarrested Development of Literary Journalism in the Empire
-
-
[1] HSE University
-
- Localización: The Routledge Companion to World Literary Journalism / John S. Bak (ed. lit.), Bill Reynolds (ed. lit.), 2023, ISBN 978-0-367-35524-1, págs. 359-372
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
This chapter details how Russian literary journalism negotiated censorship laws despite their problematic nature. It begins with Ivan Turgenev’s Записки охотника (A Sportsman’s Sketches, 1852), a collection of sketches and short stories dealing with the infamous “peasant question,” a topic subjected to censorship in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia. To have his book published, Turgenev exploited the fact that the system was overly personalized: he curried favor with a censor he knew and was subsequently given approval. Leo Tolstoy attempted a different approach, preempting censorship be preparing his own potential corrections to one of his Севастопольские рассказы (Sevastopol Sketches, 1855); his failure resulted in the sketch’s flagrant rewriting along political lines. Other authors simply tried evasion: Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Трущобные люди ([Slum people], 1887) was immediately banned, but successfully republished in pieces a few years later; and Vlas Doroshevitch kept producing sketches without official consent that eventually became his Сахалин (Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East, 1902). Ironically, his book was grudgingly allowed by imperial authorities, only to be buried by their Soviet counterparts, who proved to be far less tolerant to politically sensitive works.
