| This dissertation explores the use of embedded letters in eighteenth- and nineteenth century Russian literature. It is my contention that the letter or exchange of letters---with its unique voice, written format and intrinsic address to another---is inevitably a living human document, one that introduces into a literary work additional voices and viewpoints, texture and interest as well as a zone of incompleteness.; I begin with a historical survey of the letter's usage in various eighteenth-century genres (the letter-writing manual, Petrine prose tales, epistolary novels and satirical prose). These works illustrate some of the letter's primary contradictions such as the paradox of privacy; although an intimate form of self-expression, letters are addressed to another which often then becomes others. Chapter two focuses on the inserted letter's role as a mechanism for honesty or deceit in the Russian society tale, drawing on the letter's generic capacity to inspire trust in the reader and a stance of intimacy from the writer. The subsequent chapter is devoted to Tatiana's letter---part fantasy, part unparalleled trustfulness---in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Of the many contradictions that letter communication engenders, Tatiana's letter instances one important set of epistolary extremes: although a very real form of communication, the letter's inherent distance, coupled with the intensification of writing, accommodates and encourages idealization. Chapter three is followed by an investigation of the "Tatiana letter" revised and imported into three works written after Pushkin's novel-in-verse: Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin (1878), Lermontov's "Princess Mary" (1840), and Dostoevsky's "White Nights" (1848). In my last chapter, I explore a final epistolary contradiction---the letter's interplay between distance and embrace---which is exemplified most intensely in Pulkheria's letter to Raskolnikov and his immediate thought-response in Crime and Punishment.; It is the argument of my thesis that the inserted letter is not merely a mechanical literary device, but rather a robust, organic element. Like every living thing, it has the capacity to generate more than itself, it both feeds off its environment and into it---and thus it has appealed so powerfully to Romantic and Realist authors. |
