19th-century Study Group
The BASEES 19th-century Study Group is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars interested in the literature, culture, history and society of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Eurasia during the long nineteenth century. We seek to promote research, teaching, and public awareness of the region’s cultures, languages, and histories across the long nineteenth century, and to foster new connections and enhance networking among academics and students working in these areas.
The group's current convenors are Marta Łukaszewicz (Warsaw), Muireann Maguire (Exeter), and Margarita Vaysman (Oxford).
The 19th-century Study Group supports scholars and students interested in the following issues (this list is not exhaustive):
• Fostering research on 19C topics in our region;
• Supporting the teaching of 19C topics in our region in Higher Education, in the UK and elsewhere;
• Developing fresh approaches to canonical topics in our field (e.g. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, the growth of the Russian intelligentsia) as well as support for topics that have been less explored;
• Considering how 19C studies in our region can respond to the imperative to diversify and decolonize;
• Promoting interdisciplinary enquiry and transnational links among scholars and students of the 19th-century in our region.
We regularly host events, both online and in-person, and typically sponsor one or more panels at the annual BASEES Conference. Our events are publicized on the BASEES mailing list and elsewhere, and have often led to publications.
There is no membership list for the Study Group as such, but all BASEES members are welcome to attend our events. We welcome proposals for conferences, publications, research talks and other pathways to raising the profile of 19th-century Slavonic Studies and enhancing the quality of 19th-century scholarship in the UK.
The 19th-century Study Group was founded in 1972 as the 19C Russian literature seminar, and has been active for over 50 years. Below we have highlighted some of the Study Group’s key events and the publications to emerge from these.
Events
Khvoshchinskaya at 200, 14-15 April 2023. This two-day conference, hosted at Clare College, Cambridge in honour of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya's jubilee, was the first international conference ever devoted to her (organized by Anna Berman (Cambridge) and Hilde Hoogenboom (Arizona), and supported by the 19thC Study Group). Scholars from across the UK, North America, Europe, and Russia were in attendance, with some joining on Zoom. Presentations were given by Margarita Vaysman (Oxford), Jehanne Gheith (Duke), Evgeniia Stroganova (Independent Scholar), Svetlana Grenier (Georgetown), Alexey Vdovin (HSE), Hilde Hoogenboom (Arizona State), Diana Greene in absentia (New York, read by Nora Favorov), Anna A. Berman (Cambridge), Polina de Mauny ( Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle), Helen Stuhr-Rommereim (Swarthmore), and Romy Taylor (Independent Scholar). The conference was followed by a translation event at Pushkin House, London at which four translators read from their new Khvoshchinskaya translations: Nora Favorov, Anastassia Kostrioukova, Erik McDonald, and Karen Rosneck.
2022
Bristol Dostoevsky Workshop; 12 Oct 2022. The half-day event was organized by Connor Doak and hosted at the University of Bristol. This workshop focused on new interpretations of Dostoevsky, with a postgraduate panel including Alina Fiorella (Bristol) on Zosima in Brothers Karamazov as impostor, Christina Karakepeli (Exeter) on the Greek reception of Dostoevsky, and Saffy Mubarak Mirghani (UCL-SSEES) on Dostoevsky’s influence on African-American literature and culture. The keynote was delivered by Sarah Hudspith (Leeds), on ‘Dostoevsky’s Ideas of Russianness: A Decolonial Critique’; she subsequently published a blog post based on this talk. Finally, Greta Matzner-Gore (University of Southern California) delivered a virtual talk on ‘The Improbable Poetics of Crime and Punishment’; colleagues from the North American Dostoevsky Society joined online. For a full report on this event, see here.
2019
Russian Realism as Will and Representation Conference at University of St Andrews, 17 June 2019
2018
Plagiarizing Posterity: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Backwards; 8 Jun 2018. A one-day conference held at the University of Exeter, jointly sponsored by the 19th and 20th Century BASEES Study Groups. The event was funded by BASEES and the University of Exeter’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The keynote speakers were Ilya Vinitsky (Princeton) and Timothy Langen (Missouri).
Selected conference proceedings were published Open Access in book form by Open Book as Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature (2021), ed. by Timothy Langen and Muireann Maguire, and can be downloaded here.
2016
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment at 150; 21 Oct 2016. The University of Bristol hosted this event, organized by Connor Doak. It brought together Sarah Hudspith (Leeds), with a paper titled ‘Raskolnikov Remembers: Memory in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment’ and Oliver Ready, who offered his reflections on translating the novel in ‘Cat-and-Mouse with Dostoevsky: The Translator as Detective’. The event marked the first time the 19C Study Group held a hybrid event, linking up with a North American Dostoevsky Society audience who had gathered at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
2014
New UK Research in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature; 1 Feb 2014. This symposium held at Darwin College, Cambridge and organized by Katherine Bowers (University of British Columbia). A selection of papers were subsequently published in Modern Languages Open. More information can be found here.
2011
Russian 19C Studies: The State of Art; 19 Dec 2011. A half-day workshop held at the University of Leeds by Ruth Coates (Bristol) and Sarah Hudspith (Leeds).
2009
Vekhi Centenary Conference 1909-2009; 7-9 July 2009. In 2009 the 19th-century Study Group, supported by the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA), held the a centenary conference on the Vekhi collection. The event was co-organized by Robin Aizlewood (UCL-SSEES) and Ruth Coates (Bristol). Speakers included Philip Boobbyer, Ivan Esaulov, Aleksandr Etkind, Catherine Evtuhov, Stuart Finkel, Gary Hamburg, Frances Nethercott, Randall Poole, Christopher Read, Bernice Rosenthal, Jutta Scherrer, Elena Takho-Godi, James West, and Evert van der Zweerde.
2007
The 2007 symposium was held in Bristol on 3 July. The programme included papers by Neil Cornwell (Zosima triangle: Dostoevsky, Manzoni and Odoevsky); Robert Reid (Syllogism and Enthymeme in Tolstoi’s ‘The Death of Ivan Il’ich’); Derek Offord (narod in classical Russian thought); Ruth Coates (Russian religious renaissance); Charles Ellis (attitudes to science in the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia)
2005
The 2005 symposium was held in Bristol on 5 July. The programme included papers by Richard Peace (on Denis Davydov); Derek Offord (Alexander Herzen and the House of Rothschild ); Robert Reid (Habitus in Dostoevskii’s House of the Dead); Neil Cornwell (Dostoevskii and the Absurd); Sarah Hudspith (Tolstoi’s Resurrection).
2004
The 2004 symposium was held in Bristol on 6 July, and the programme included papers by Robert Reid (Gogol: Stoic inferences), Richard Freeborn (Belinskii’s 'Letter to Gogol'), Joe Andrew (Tolstoy’s 'Family Happiness'), Charles Ellis (‘War and Peace’) and Margaret Tejerizo (women’s autobiography writing.
2003
In 2003 a symposium was held, which included papers on Graphic Satire and Aesthetic Vision in Russia, 1855-1870 (Carol Adlam), Lermontov's Poetics of Monotony (Robin Aizlewood), Apollon Maikov and the Cult of the Leader (Richard Peace), and Madness and Narrative Disintegration in Dostoevskii's Dvoinik (Claire Whitehead). The proceedings of the ‘Society Tale’ and ‘Gothic’ conferences have been published by Rodopi (see below).
1996 – 2002
The 19C Study Group was revived in 1996 after a period in abeyance. From 1996 to 2002, the Group met annually, normally in the second week of July, for a one-day conference in Bristol. The conference programme usually centred around a topic, such as ‘The Society Tale’ (1996), the ‘Fin de Siècle’ (1998), ‘Pushkin’ (1999), or ‘Reports from Foreign Parts: Russian Writers Abroad’ (2000), ‘Tolstoy’ (2001), and ‘Russian Lyric Poetry’ (2002).
1972 – 1983
The group’s first incarnation was as the Nineteenth Century Russian-Literature Seminar, formed in 1972 by Malcolm Jones (Nottingham) and Bill Leatherbarrow (Sheffield). The group had an informal association with British Universities Association of Slavists (BUAS), the forerunner to BASEES.
The first meeting of the seminar was held in March 1972, featuring papers on Dostoevsky by Richard Peace and Steward Sutherland. The group met twice yearly in various UK universities. Special events were held mark the 150th anniversary of Tolstoy’s birth (1978), as well as the centenary of Dostoevsky’s passing (1981) and Turgenev’s (1983).
These meetings led to two edited collections on Tolstoy (ed. Malcolm Jones, 1978), Dostoevsky (ed. Malcolm Jones and Garth Terry, 1983), and a special issue of Dostoevsky Studies in 1982, again edited by Malcolm Jones.
Publications
A number of publications have emerged from the 19th-century Study Group events, including, in chronological order:
Malcolm V. Jones, ed., New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Malcolm V. Jones and Garth M. Terry, ed. New Essays on Dostoyevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Malcolm V. Jones and W.J. Leatherbarrow, ed. ‘Dostoevsky Centenary Conference at the University of Nottingham’: A special issue of Dostoevsky Studies (1982), no. 3, pp. 3-78.
Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen, ed. Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature (Cambridge: Open Book, 2021). Open Access; available here.
Katherine Bowers, ed. ‘New UK Research in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature’: A cluster of three articles that emerged from the workshop at Darwin College, Cambridge, in 2014. Open access; available here.
Neil Cornwell, ed. The Society Tale in Russian Literature: From Odoevskii to Tolstoi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998)
This collection of essays is the first book to appear on the society tale in nineteenth-century Russian fiction. The volume emerged from the 19C Study Group’s symposium on the society tale held at the University of Bristol in 1996.
Neil Cornwell, ed. The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999)
This collection of essays is based on the proceedings of the conference on ‘Nineteenth-century Russian Gothic-Fantastic’ held at the University of Bristol in July 1997.