Objective authorship: Photography and writing in Russia, 1905--1975

In the nineteenth century, photography's debut and rapid proliferation presented a direct challenge to realism in artistic representation as the camera apparatus cast new doubt on the creative agency of the artist. But by the early 1930s, the camera was embraced as an objective means of fixing fact, both documenting and shaping a new political landscape. Confronting the challenges to notions of subjectivity in photographic authorship, this dissertation explores how photography affected shifting conceptions of literary authorship in the twentieth century in the photo-textual spaces of author-photographers.;The authors who stand at the center of this investigation are Lev Tolstoy, Leonid Andreev, Vasilii Rozanov, Mikhail Prishvin, Il'ia Ehrenburg, Il'ia Il'f, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Chapter 1 establishes a framework for the problem of "authorship" in the age of photography through the figure and works of a literary celebrity: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Chapter 2 considers how the spread of photography and its extension into the private sphere affected modes of literary production through the archive of Leonid Andreev's color photographs and Vasilii Rozanov's incorporation and transformation of photographs in his Fallen Leaves (Opavshie list'ia, 1913). Chapter 3 explores how Mikhail Prishvin's microgeographical rendering of changing Russian and Soviet reality in a series of constantly evolving photo-textual projects between 1905-1954 created a bridged the gaps between his pre-revolutionary authorial identity as a symbolist author and his role as a pedagogue in the Stalinist era. Chapter 4 shows how Il'ia Ehrenburg's album My Paris (Moi Parizh, 1933) and Il'ia Il'f's contributions to "American Photographs" ("Amerikanskie fotografii," 1936) dramatized the struggle to reconcile a subjective literary perspective with emerging notions of documentary photography under the aesthetic regime of socialist realism. And, by way of conclusion, Chapter 5 confronts the contingency of the photograph and the problems of collective authorship through an examination of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's use of photography in The Gulag Archipelago (Arkhipelag, 1973-1975), revealing how the authorial subject is threatened by the camera and its subsequent record. While the photograph provides an objective picture, it is but a limited snapshot which requires inscription. It is in these framings of the self within the photograph -- formal, textual, contextual -- that the author-photographer defines a subjective and personal space and transforms the objective medium of photography into a medium of self-representation.