RUSSIA READS ROUSSEAU 1762-182 (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) - Hardcover

Thomas Barran teaches at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

Thomas Barran teaches at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

Literary genius, educator, dedicated patriot, misanthrope, scoundrel, proto-Jacobin, outright lunatic: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the early years, left a bewildering pattern on the Russian intellectual landscape. Fully tracing this pattern for the first time, this book reveals the nature and extent of Rousseau's initial influence in Russia, as well as a great deal about social, cultural, and political contexts in which Rousseau was so variously understood by the Russians.
The idea of a wandering rebel, poor, prolific, and eloquent, an outsider and an outcast, was already deeply resonant with Russians in the late eighteenth century. Accordingly, Thomas Barran shows here, Rousseau was quickly remade in Russians' own model of the visionary. Russia Reads Rousseau makes explicit the selectivity, ambivalence, and energy with which Russians accomplished this task, managing to use Rousseau as a bulwark against skepticism, atheism, and materialism while overlooking (or nullifying) his powerful historical pessimism, critique of civilization and progress, and implicitly democratic concepts of social contract and popular sovereignty. With its clear and concise interpretations of both Rousseau's texts and the echoes of them in Russia, Barran's book provides a refreshing corrective to the numerous misinterpretations both by Russian authors who introduced Rousseau to Russia and by scholars who have analyzed the Russian reception of Rousseau.
Mapping Rousseau's varied and extensive influence, Barran considers major writers such as Karamzin, Zhukovskii, and Pushkin, as well as lesser known or forgotten figures. He shows how Rousseau's works were Russianized in numerous different ways, as translations, adaptations, and commentary and in editors' or translators' introductions, fictional or biographical accounts, poetry, prose, and even footnotes. As interesting for its insights into Russian character and culture as it is for its unprecedented view of the "Russian" Rousseau, Barran's book should prove indispensable to an understanding of the writer and his Russian readers.