Ilya Kliger
Biographic Data
| ID | 951575 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ilya Kliger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ilya |
| FAMILY NAME | Kliger |
| SIGNATURE | KLIGER I |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-5579-1009 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Peasant to Revolutionary: Combined Genre in Populist Agitation Literature
This article examines a series of literary agitation texts that have largely remained outside the purview of literary scholarship and cultural studies. These works were composed by revolutionary populists between 1873 and 1875 as part of the going‐to‐the‐people movement to spur working people toward action, and ultimately, a revolutionary uprising. The article will focus on one of these works, Sergei Stepniak‐Kravchinsky’s Tale of a Kopeck ( Skaz…
Poética histórica entre Rússia e Ocidente: Por um modelo não linear de história da literatura e de ontologia social
Este ensaio explora o modo pelo qual a persistência de formas literárias na história foi abordada pela tradição russa da Poética Histórica (Aleksandr Veselóvski, Viktor Jirmúnski, Mikhail Bakhtin, Formalismo Russo) e dentro de certa vertente do marxismo ocidental (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson). A discussão é, em parte, descritiva e, em parte, programática: trata-se de uma reconstrução que não pertente fazer totalmente justiça a …
Historical Poetics between Russia and the West: Toward a Nonlinear Model of Literary History and Social Ontology
This essay explores the manner in which the persistence of literary forms in history has been addressed by the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics (Alexander Veselovsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian Formalism) and within a certain strain of Western Marxism (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson). The discussion is in part descriptive and in part programmatic: a reconstruction that does not pretend to do full justice to…
Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics
Preface: Hegel in Russia
Hegel’s political philosophy and the social imaginary of early Russian realism
Resurgent Forms in Ivan Goncharov and Alexander Veselovsky: Toward a Historical Poetics of Tragic Realism
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I would like to summon historical poetics, as delineated by Alexander Veselovsky in particular, in order to shed light on the function of some oddly atavistic but crucial sections of Ivan Goncharov's last novel, The Precipice ( Obryv , 1869). The sections, I will argue, have been unjustifiably dismissed by generations of critics as simply falling short of Goncharov's realist best. An approach informed …
Genre and Actuality in Belinskii, Herzen, and Goncharov: Toward a Genealogy of the Tragic Pattern in Russian Realism
In this article, Ilya Kliger describes the workings of "tragic realism" during the early to mid-1840s in Russia by engaging with the critical essays and letters of Vissarion Belinskii as well as with the first novels of Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Herzen. Kliger seeks to show that the concepts and forms produced by the authors standing at the inception of the realist tradition in Russia can be usefully seen as transpositions of the Hegelian theo…
Poetics of Brotherhood: Organic and Mechanistic Narrative in Late Tolstoi
In this article, Ilya Kliger and Nasser Zakariya treat Lev Tolstoi's conception of brotherhood from a narratological perspective. In the process, they trace the outlines of late Tolstoian narrative poetics, situating it within a variegated landscape of Tolstoi's own more properly "realist" literary practice, and offering broader suggestions on the workings of narrative in its capacity to model social relations and ethical action. A narratological…
R ussia (18th–19th Century)
The rise of the Russian novel in the middle of the eighteenth century coincides with a period of intense interest in and translation of narrative works from Western Europe. In the period from the 1730s to the 1760s, précieux romances and picaresque and politico‐ philosophical novels appeared in translations from French and English in handwritten and printed editions. Along with translations came the first attempts to defend the novel against the …
World Literature Beyond Hegemony in Yuri M. Lotman's Cultural Semiotics
A temptation for many who are concerned with history and the typology of cultures and civilization is to say, ‘That didn’t happen, so it couldn’t have happened’, or, in other words, ‘This is unknown to me, so it must be impossible’. This in fact means that the chronological section, so tiny in comparison with the total written and oral history of mankind, which we can study thanks to the written documents which have been preserved, is taken as th…
Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin'sAuthor and Hero in Aesthetic Activity
Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls "a crisis of authorship." The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within thelongue duréecontext of debates about the s…
Organic and Mechanistic Time and the Limits of Narrative
This essay examines the narratalogical presuppositions of organic and mechanistic accounts of the world. If our hypothesis about the respective alliances between organic and mechanistic explanatory modes on the one hand and the narrative poles of sjuzhet and fabula on the other is correct, and if it is true, moreover, that narrative is necessarily constituted in the field of tension between these two narrative poles, then it is no wonder that nat…
Minding the Gap: Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement
Under different names, alienation has been around for a long time. However, Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution marks a new and deeper degree of alienation. Kant's definition of the subject-denied contact with the world as such and forced constantly to synthesize the immediacy of intuitions with the lawfulness of concepts-is a hopelessly riven "I-think." Reading Kant was a traumatic event for contemporaries, especially for philosophers, who att…
Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin'sAuthor and Hero in Aesthetic Activity
Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls "a crisis of authorship." The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within thelongue duréecontext of debates about the s…
Minding the Gap: Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement
Under different names, alienation has been around for a long time. However, Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution marks a new and deeper degree of alienation. Kant's definition of the subject-denied contact with the world as such and forced constantly to synthesize the immediacy of intuitions with the lawfulness of concepts-is a hopelessly riven "I-think." Reading Kant was a traumatic event for contemporaries, especially for philosophers, who att…
Genre and Actuality in Belinskii, Herzen, and Goncharov: Toward a Genealogy of the Tragic Pattern in Russian Realism
In this article, Ilya Kliger describes the workings of "tragic realism" during the early to mid-1840s in Russia by engaging with the critical essays and letters of Vissarion Belinskii as well as with the first novels of Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Herzen. Kliger seeks to show that the concepts and forms produced by the authors standing at the inception of the realist tradition in Russia can be usefully seen as transpositions of the Hegelian theo…
World Literature Beyond Hegemony in Yuri M. Lotman's Cultural Semiotics
A temptation for many who are concerned with history and the typology of cultures and civilization is to say, ‘That didn’t happen, so it couldn’t have happened’, or, in other words, ‘This is unknown to me, so it must be impossible’. This in fact means that the chronological section, so tiny in comparison with the total written and oral history of mankind, which we can study thanks to the written documents which have been preserved, is taken as th…
Historical Poetics between Russia and the West: Toward a Nonlinear Model of Literary History and Social Ontology
This essay explores the manner in which the persistence of literary forms in history has been addressed by the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics (Alexander Veselovsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian Formalism) and within a certain strain of Western Marxism (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson). The discussion is in part descriptive and in part programmatic: a reconstruction that does not pretend to do full justice to…
Hegel’s political philosophy and the social imaginary of early Russian realism
Poetics of Brotherhood: Organic and Mechanistic Narrative in Late Tolstoi
In this article, Ilya Kliger and Nasser Zakariya treat Lev Tolstoi's conception of brotherhood from a narratological perspective. In the process, they trace the outlines of late Tolstoian narrative poetics, situating it within a variegated landscape of Tolstoi's own more properly "realist" literary practice, and offering broader suggestions on the workings of narrative in its capacity to model social relations and ethical action. A narratological…
Organic and Mechanistic Time and the Limits of Narrative
This essay examines the narratalogical presuppositions of organic and mechanistic accounts of the world. If our hypothesis about the respective alliances between organic and mechanistic explanatory modes on the one hand and the narrative poles of sjuzhet and fabula on the other is correct, and if it is true, moreover, that narrative is necessarily constituted in the field of tension between these two narrative poles, then it is no wonder that nat…
Minding the Gap: Toward a Historical Poetics of Estrangement
Under different names, alienation has been around for a long time. However, Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution marks a new and deeper degree of alienation. Kant's definition of the subject-denied contact with the world as such and forced constantly to synthesize the immediacy of intuitions with the lawfulness of concepts-is a hopelessly riven "I-think." Reading Kant was a traumatic event for contemporaries, especially for philosophers, who att…
Organic and Mechanistic Time and the Limits of Narrative
This essay examines the narratalogical presuppositions of organic and mechanistic accounts of the world. If our hypothesis about the respective alliances between organic and mechanistic explanatory modes on the one hand and the narrative poles of sjuzhet and fabula on the other is correct, and if it is true, moreover, that narrative is necessarily constituted in the field of tension between these two narrative poles, then it is no wonder that nat…
Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin'sAuthor and Hero in Aesthetic Activity
Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls "a crisis of authorship." The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within thelongue duréecontext of debates about the s…
R ussia (18th–19th Century)
The rise of the Russian novel in the middle of the eighteenth century coincides with a period of intense interest in and translation of narrative works from Western Europe. In the period from the 1730s to the 1760s, précieux romances and picaresque and politico‐ philosophical novels appeared in translations from French and English in handwritten and printed editions. Along with translations came the first attempts to defend the novel against the …
World Literature Beyond Hegemony in Yuri M. Lotman's Cultural Semiotics
A temptation for many who are concerned with history and the typology of cultures and civilization is to say, ‘That didn’t happen, so it couldn’t have happened’, or, in other words, ‘This is unknown to me, so it must be impossible’. This in fact means that the chronological section, so tiny in comparison with the total written and oral history of mankind, which we can study thanks to the written documents which have been preserved, is taken as th…
Genre and Actuality in Belinskii, Herzen, and Goncharov: Toward a Genealogy of the Tragic Pattern in Russian Realism
In this article, Ilya Kliger describes the workings of "tragic realism" during the early to mid-1840s in Russia by engaging with the critical essays and letters of Vissarion Belinskii as well as with the first novels of Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Herzen. Kliger seeks to show that the concepts and forms produced by the authors standing at the inception of the realist tradition in Russia can be usefully seen as transpositions of the Hegelian theo…
Poetics of Brotherhood: Organic and Mechanistic Narrative in Late Tolstoi
In this article, Ilya Kliger and Nasser Zakariya treat Lev Tolstoi's conception of brotherhood from a narratological perspective. In the process, they trace the outlines of late Tolstoian narrative poetics, situating it within a variegated landscape of Tolstoi's own more properly "realist" literary practice, and offering broader suggestions on the workings of narrative in its capacity to model social relations and ethical action. A narratological…
Resurgent Forms in Ivan Goncharov and Alexander Veselovsky: Toward a Historical Poetics of Tragic Realism
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I would like to summon historical poetics, as delineated by Alexander Veselovsky in particular, in order to shed light on the function of some oddly atavistic but crucial sections of Ivan Goncharov's last novel, The Precipice ( Obryv , 1869). The sections, I will argue, have been unjustifiably dismissed by generations of critics as simply falling short of Goncharov's realist best. An approach informed …
Preface: Hegel in Russia
Hegel’s political philosophy and the social imaginary of early Russian realism
Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics
Historical Poetics between Russia and the West: Toward a Nonlinear Model of Literary History and Social Ontology
This essay explores the manner in which the persistence of literary forms in history has been addressed by the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics (Alexander Veselovsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian Formalism) and within a certain strain of Western Marxism (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson). The discussion is in part descriptive and in part programmatic: a reconstruction that does not pretend to do full justice to…
Poética histórica entre Rússia e Ocidente: Por um modelo não linear de história da literatura e de ontologia social
Este ensaio explora o modo pelo qual a persistência de formas literárias na história foi abordada pela tradição russa da Poética Histórica (Aleksandr Veselóvski, Viktor Jirmúnski, Mikhail Bakhtin, Formalismo Russo) e dentro de certa vertente do marxismo ocidental (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson). A discussão é, em parte, descritiva e, em parte, programática: trata-se de uma reconstrução que não pertente fazer totalmente justiça a …
Peasant to Revolutionary: Combined Genre in Populist Agitation Literature
This article examines a series of literary agitation texts that have largely remained outside the purview of literary scholarship and cultural studies. These works were composed by revolutionary populists between 1873 and 1875 as part of the going‐to‐the‐people movement to spur working people toward action, and ultimately, a revolutionary uprising. The article will focus on one of these works, Sergei Stepniak‐Kravchinsky’s Tale of a Kopeck ( Skaz…
Philosophy (12 works) · Art (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Politics (5 works)