Susanne Fusso

Nose and Other Stories

Fyodor Sologub

A boy who feels persecuted by the banality of everyday life yearns to ascend to the cold and majestic plane of the stars. A seamstress finds liberation of a sort in “becoming” a dog and howling at the moon. A club of young girls masquerade as the grieving fiancées of strange men. This book brings together these and other remarkable short stories by the Russian Symbolist Fyodor Sologub that explore the lengths to which people will go to transcend the mundane.

Renowned as one of late imperial Russia’s finest stylists, Sologub bridges the great nineteenth-century novel and the fin-de-siècle avant-garde. He stands out for his masterful command of both realist and fantastic storytelling; his play with language evinces a belief in its capacity to access other worlds and other levels of meaning. Many of Sologub’s stories are set among children whose alienation from the adult world has lent them imagination and curiosity, enabling them to create an alternative reality. At the same time, he bluntly examines the sordid realities of late imperial Russian society and frankly presents sometimes unconventional sexuality. The book also features a selection of Sologub’s “little fairy tales,” ambiguous parables couched in childlike language whose ingenuity anticipates the miniatures and “incidents” of Daniil Kharms. Susanne Fusso’s elegant translation offers these artful tales to an English-speaking audience.

To the Stars and Other Stories

Priscilla Meyer

These fourteen essays reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary character of Russian literature research in general and of the study of Gogol in particular, focusing on specific works, Gogol's own character, and the various approaches to aesthetic, religious, and philosophical issues raised by his writing.

Logos and the Russian Word

Essays on Gogol

Most discussions of sexuality in the work of Dostoevsky have been framed in Freudian terms. But Dostoevsky himself wrote about sexuality from a decidedly pre-Freudian perspective. By looking at the views of human sexual development that were available in Dostoevsky's time and that he, an avid reader and observer of his own social context, absorbed and reacted to, Susanne Fusso gives us a new way of understanding a critical element in the writing of one of Russia's literary masters. Beyond discovering Dostoevsky's own views and representations of sexuality as a reflection of his culture and his time, Fusso also explores his artistic treatment of how children and adolescents discover sexuality as part of their growth. Some of the topics Fusso considers are Dostoevsky's search for an appropriate artistic language for sexuality, a young narrator's experimentation with homoerotic desire and unconventional narrative in A Raw Youth; and Dostoevsky's approach to a young man's sexual development in A Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov. She also explores his complex treatment of a child's secret sexuality in his account of the Kroneberg child abuse case in A Writer's Diary; and his conception of the ideal family, a type of family that appears in his works mainly by negative example. Focusing mainly on sexual practices considered "deviant" in Dostoevsky's time--both because these are the practices that his young characters confront and because they offer the most intriguing interpretive problems--Fusso decodes the author's texts and their social contexts. In doing so, she highlights one thread in the intricate thematic weave of Dostoevsky's novels and newly illuminates his artistic process.

Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky

Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. These are a few of the great works of Russian prose that first appeared in the Russian Herald, a journal founded and edited by Mikhail Katkov. Yet because of his conservative politics and intrusive editing practices, Katkov has been either ignored or demonized by scholars in both Russia and the West. In Putin's Russia, he is now being hailed as the "savior of the fatherland" due to his aggressive Russian nationalism. In Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, Susanne Fusso examines Katkov's literary career without vilification or canonization, focusing on the ways in which his nationalism fueled his drive to create a canon of Russian literature and support its recognition around the world. In each chapter, Fusso considers Katkov's relationship with a major Russian literary figure. In addition to Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, she explores Katkov's interactions with Vissarion Belinsky, Evgeniia Tur, and the legacy of Aleksandr Pushkin. As a writer of articles and editorials, Katkov presented a clear program for Russian literature: to affirm the political and historical importance of the Russian nationality as expressed through its language. As a powerful and entrepreneurial publisher, he also sought, encouraged, and paid for the writing of the works that were to embody that program, the works we now recognize as among the greatest achievements of Russian literature. This groundbreaking study will fascinate scholars, students, and general readers interested in Russian literature and literary history.

Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel

Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy

This strikingly original work presents an integral and inclusive explanatory model for the elusive narrative strategies of Gogol's Dead Souls; in the process, it draws larger conclusions about Gogol's creative methods and aesthetic concerns. Throughout his career, Gogol manifests two seemingly contradictory urges: the urge toward order, system, clarity and wholeness, and the urge toward disorder, disruption, obscurity, and fragmentation. The author seeks to make a system, an anatomy, of Gogol's impulses toward disorder and disruption in Dead Souls in all their various and distinctive aspects. In anatomizing Gogolian disorder, she explores the mythology of creativity and lying in Gogol; his (at least literary) fear of the family; the relation between the uses of obscurity in Dead Souls and the poetry of Russian Sentimentalism, especially Zhukovskii's; Dead Souls as parable; and the mutually subversive relation between ¹ction and non¹ction in Gogol.

Susanne Fusso

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