This dissertation investigates the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific context that allowed for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the European fin de siècle. In contrast to standard impressionistic accounts of the Inter-Arts, it foregrounds and examines the time's immensely popular synaesthetic metaphor, while culturally and formally analyzing interartistic works. This work surveys the diverse and heterogeneous discourses that engage with synaesthesia: the figurative mixing or conflation of sense-impressions, for instance, in the perception of sound as color. It shows that the synaesthetic metaphor, usually treated as a trite Modernist mannerism, not only epitomized the synthetic aspirations of the Modernist arts, but also invigorated the exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle by bridging aesthetic, scientific, and ethical discourses. As a nexus of controversial and fascinating cultural debates, synaesthesia acquired an intricate depth and complex resonance, which this dissertation examines by identifying synaesthetically informed fin-de-siècle cultural and scientific concepts (such as electricity and the phonograph) and using them as interpretative tools to analyze three specific interartistic sites of literary, artistic, and musical modernism. Chapter One shows how Oscar Wilde's Salomé overcomes its own language by turning to the senses, generates new extra-verbal life, both sensory and interartistic, and is transposed across the senses and the arts in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings and Richard Strauss's opera. In the second chapter, this work examines Aleksandr Skriabin's synaesthetic symphony "Prometheus" and the Russian Symbolist poetics of mystical and electric light. The final chapter discusses the phenomenological synaesthetics of Rainer Maria Rilke's middle-period thing poems (Dinggedichte) and their involvement with the visual arts, by focusing on Rilke's fascination with Rodin. It then studies the development of Rilke's synaesthetic theory in his late "Sonnets to Orpheus." Figured as a synaesthetic and phono-graphic translation, Rilke's poetic act seeks both a primordial and a technologically motivated wholeness of sensory experience. Additionally, this work offers an online companion to the dissertation that makes all the musical examples playable: an important feature of the dissertation is its combining of musicological and literary analysis, as well as visual analysis. "Beautiful Colored, Musical Things" proposes a new way of conceptualizing early interartistic Modernism, by suggesting that the synaesthetic metaphor defines and motivates the interartistic exchanges at the fin de siècle. In its critical and methodological goals, this dissertation seeks to foster interdisciplinary exchange, and to overcome the limitations of discipline-bound criticism.

This dissertation explores the emergence of Soviet sonic culture––a concept I define as a set of practices, expectations, understandings, and preconceptions surrounding audible phenomena––during the early years of the Stalinist era (1929-41). On a global level, twentieth–century sound reproduction technologies enacted a dramatic shift in listeners’ conceptions of attention, space, and community, and I contend that these technologies had a distinct impact on Soviet literature and cinema. Unlike their Western counterparts who aimed to capture, commodify, and sell sound, many artists in the USSR saw sound reproduction as a vital tool for the construction of state socialism. In case studies that investigate the work of Dziga Vertov, Valentin Kataev, Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Evgenii Cherviakov, and Andrei Platonov, I suggest that we can interpret these artists’ depictions of monumental construction, industrial development, and reformative incarceration as the imagination of new listeners for a new country. Accordingly, this dissertation problematizes an enduring binary in the Slavic academic field that associates official, state-sponsored art with Stalin’s repressive censorship, and which charts unofficial, unpublished art as a more legitimate site of artistic innovation. Contrary to a common narrative of the Soviet state’s ideological rigidity, sonic culture’s enthusiasm for incorporating sound into Soviet art suggests that Stalin’s uncompromising push for technological modernity led to officially sanctioned innovations in artistic form and expressivity. Ultimately, I argue that Soviet sonic culture significantly shaped the development of Soviet literature and film.

While critical in its assertions, this work is at its core a cultural history, and I have intentionally based my research on newspapers, rarely-cited technical publications, and memoirs from Soviet sound designers, inventors, critics, filmmakers, and writers. The project integrates a media archaeological approach into its method, but I expand upon the possibilities of media archaeology by exploring how technology is limited or emboldened by ideology. This analysis of Soviet sonic culture and the listeners it produced––both real and imaginary––offers more than a new lens for the Soviet ‘30s: it is a paradigm for determining how media technologies within non-capitalist modernity both established and overturned the relationships we may expect to find between art, culture, and power.

The dissertation examines the intersection and conflict of two aesthetic imperatives, one mimetic and the other didactic, in the literary culture of early eighteenth-century Germany and mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Describing a structure that I call "visionary mimesis" or "progressive realism," I show how texts struggle to bridge the gap between imitation and transformation, the present and the future, or what is and what ought to be. I present this underlying contradiction as a defining dynamic of both Enlightenment and Realist literature.

First I analyze J. C. Gottsched's Critical Poetics (1729), showing how the text deploys multiple shifting understandings of literary mimesis in order to reconcile the "imitation of nature" with the demand for morally instructive portrayals. Then I examine how this conflict is worked out in a fictional text, C. M. Wieland's novel The History of Agathon (1766-67). After tracing Wieland's turn toward a more "earthly" aesthetic in his earliest writings, I demonstrate that his novel pushes apart the very antinomies that it ostensibly seeks to combine. I then examine how the contradictions of "visionary mimesis" are reworked in the cultural context of the "1860s" in Russia. I describe the strained yet wonderfully ingenious interpretations put forth by the radical realist critic N. A. Dobroliubov in his desperate attempt to find the revolutionary hero within Russian reality. I then examine how F. M. Dostoevsky pursues a religious version of the radical project. After turning to his correspondence and his Diary of a Writer for background, I show how The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80) creates a path from ordinary experience to spiritual transcendence.

The comparative angle of the dissertation places nineteenth-century Russian literature in a broader European context. Texts of this period are often viewed as precursors of twentieth-century socialist realism; I argue that they continue an Enlightenment project and, with the German texts, belong to the larger literary configuration of "visionary mimesis." An awareness of this configuration helps explain the complexity and instability of "progressive realist" texts. Because these texts often fail to span the contradictions of imitation and transformation, they mirror the perennial cultural gap between our objective perceptions and our subjective visions.

This dissertation traces the charged dynamic of mimetic characterization in late Soviet literature though a study of the works of Yuri Trifonov, Andrei Bitov, and Vasilii Belov. Emerging from the Stalinist era and its socialist realist doctrine of the “positive hero,” Soviet writers faced the daunting opportunity of returning a human face to literary characters. This study argues that writers in the era of “developed socialism” were drawn towards this prospect of writing “living people” into their works, only to be stymied by the incompatibility and obsolescence of mimetic modes of characterization inherited from the Russian literary tradition to individuals shaped by both the horrors of the recent past and a nonheroic present. This ultimate failure of mimetic characterization led writers to reference the late Soviet individual through novel means: unable to adequately represent verisimilar characters in words, the authors explored in this dissertation wove the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas surrounding this impossibility into the structure of their texts themselves.The dissertation’s three chapters examine the specific ways each author responded to this mimetic challenge through close readings of the narrative structure and character systems of texts like Trifonov’s Dom na naberezhnoi [House on the Embankment], Bitov’s Pushkinskii dom [Pushkin House], and Belov’s Privychnoe delo [A Typical Matter]. These readings are informed by the theoretical writings of both Western and Soviet literary scholars such as Lidiia Ginzburg, Gyorgy Lukács, James Phelan, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Despite the diversity of their literary styles, all three authors participated in official literary culture, and as such particular attention is given throughout this dissertation to the reception of these writer’s characters by the Soviet critical apparatus. Late Soviet writers not only had to navigate the newly opened landscape of a “socialist realism without shores” but also engaged with the legacies of 19th century Russian realism, whose model of character greatly informed understandings of mimetic characterization for a revived Russian literary culture. The limitations of this model encountered by late Soviet writers and the innovations these encounters produced have implications far beyond the field of literary history. Recent decades have seen a widespread critical reevaluation of the field of “Soviet subjectivity,” with a particular focus on the Stalinist era. A flood of new information, in particular pertaining to the routine or “everyday life” was made available after the fall of the Soviet Union, which saw the opening of historical archives and a flood of non-fiction documents, diaries and memoirs. Valuable insights can be made from a study of accounts both narrated by and about fictional persons, and this study of characterization in the late Soviet era aims to recover notions of selfhood among the writers, critics, and readers of late Soviet literature.

This dissertation aims to illuminate the late works of Varlam Shalamov, a Russian writer most famous for his six prose cycles of Kolyma Tales based on his experiences in the Gulag. While previous scholarship has focused mainly on the earlier cycles, I explore the aesthetic and ethical shift that takes place in his later texts. Drawing on theories of late style in art by Theodor Adorno, Edward Said, and Joseph Straus, I detect the breaking point in Shalamov’s trajectory as a writer in his 1965 literary manifesto “On Prose” and argue for a distinct difference in the works he wrote after it. I attribute this difference to his struggle with, and often against, the moral and formal demands of Russian literature and the constraints of Soviet censorship, as well as to his personal circumstances (internal) exile and disability (deafness). My analysis of Shalamov’s late style centers on the tension between the imperative for a Gulag survivor to bear witness and the need for a professional writer to claim authenticity and maintain creativity. The dissertation offers new insights into Shalamov’s sense of what it meant to be a writer in his contemporary context and explores the problematic encounter staged in his works between Russian literary tradition and the complexities of narrating the Gulag experience.

Chapter I deals with Shalamov’s literary manifesto, which articulates his writing as a ‘new prose’ for Russian literature. I treat “On Prose” as a manifesto and examine Shalamov’s motives for writing it. Although rooted in a legitimization project, this manifesto serves not so much as the making of a literary theory as it is the unraveling of a literary practice from within. As one of its consequences, I formulate the notion of a transitory hero encompassing both the first person narrator of a text and the historical person ‘Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov’ and detect within this concept a collision between the writer and the witness.

Chapter II analyzes The Revival of the Larch, the fifth cycle of Kolyma Tales. I argue that this cycle, which is usually considered an aesthetic masterpiece, already contains a foretaste of the difficult and ultimately unreconciled late style that haunts Shalamov’s later prose. Several of the short stories become closer in form to testimony by imitating authenticity – I focus on “The Life of Engineer Kipreev” and “The Golden Medal” – yet the voice that emerges in them is no longer solely that of a witness – but also of a writer.

Chapter III investigates Shalamov’s longer autobiographical works The Fourth Vologda (about his childhood) and the antinovel Vishera (about his first incarceration in the Northern Urals). Both works appear shaped by literary conventions, as narratives of childhood and youth. However, they are permeated by an omnipresent challenge to traditional notions of form and content. Although set in the past, they are products of a period of literary experimentation in search of a new mode of expression – subjective, intimate, and emotional – the essential task of Shalamov’s late style.

Chapter IV examines The Glove or KT-2, the unfinished sixth cycle of Kolyma Tales. This last cycle undoes the attempt at closure in The Revival of the Larch and is rough in both its incomplete form as well as in its harsh content, coming closer to the harrowing perspective of the “goner” than ever before in its mode of narration. I explore the fraught communication between the writing ‘I’ and the ‘you’ of the reader in “Love Lessons” and “Athenian Nights.” These stories anticipate the impossibility of address as well as of an addressee.

Chapter V focuses on Shalamov’s last longer work: Evening Discourses. This incomplete ‘fantastical play’ (his own generic designation) stages confrontations in Butyrka prison between his transitory hero and the four Russian Nobel laureates in literature at the time: Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Instead of declaring himself the real winner of Russian twentieth-century literature, Shalamov in this fragmentary text articulates a complicated and conflicted relationship with not only his contemporaries and compatriots, but also with his own identity as a professional writer who never stopped being a witness to some of his century’s worst atrocities.

Taking as its theme the unsayable and the unsaid in post-Stalin Russia, this interdisciplinary dissertation pushes scholars to see more of the Soviet experience than the usual `totalitarianism' lens would allow. Its six chapters apply pressure to the cold war repressive hypothesis that casts the whispering citizens of Stalin's Russia as restored to speech during Khrushchev's cultural thaw only to be muted once more in the late sixties by political stagnation. The prevalence of this view in Russian cultural studies and national collective memory has rendered it rather difficult to write about late socialism until recently, when scholars started to take a multisensory approach to the Soviet past--not only listening to the verbal narratives of the era (whether official or dissenting), but also looking at the dynamic tensions between socialist speech and the socialist body. To counter the commonplace of Soviet history that makes quiet consonant with submission or complicity, this study attends instead to the manners in which Soviet subjects opted for silence to speak truth to power, as with the Aesopian gestural language of avant-garde pantomimists. It also pursues the wily ways that subjects presumed or produced as unspeaking or unspeakable--including the deaf-mute, the racial primitive, the sexual deviant, and the illiterate criminal--performed the silences imputed to them to say something else and, so doing, improvised interesting and unexpected scripts for late socialism.

The Languages of Berkeley: An Online Exhibition celebrates the magnificent diversity of languages that advance research, teaching, and learning at the University of California, Berkeley. It is the point of embarkation for an exciting sequential exhibit that built on one post per week, showcasing an array of digitized works in the original language chosen by those who work with these languages on a daily basis. Many of these early-published works are now in the public domain and are open to the world to read and share without restriction. 

Preparations for the online exhibition began in early 2018 with the final installment published online in October 2020. Using the Library’s instance of WordPress, the library exhibit comprises short essays of nearly all of the 59 modern and ancient languages that are currently taught across 14 departments on campus plus a dozen more languages that contributors wished to include. From September 2019 to August 2020, exhibit designer Aisha Hamilton and curator Claude Potts also installed a physical companion exhibition in Moffitt Library’s Free Speech Movement Café (FSM) centering on endangered languages which was cut short by the campus closure due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Photos from that installation are archived in this catalog with the open book publishing platform Pressbooks, along with the complete entries from the online exhibition. 

Aside from core support from the Library and the Berkeley Language Center, this multi-year project would not have been possible without the contributions and hard work of more than 45 librarians, professors, lecturers, staff, and students.