Nation and Proletariat: Reimagining the Russian Empire in Fedor Reshetnikov’s Ethnographic Fictions

The Russian Empire in the late 1850-1860s was a time of stark social stratification. Left-leaning intellectuals hoped that a new generation of authors from non-noble backgrounds could create more informed representations of the “common people,” derived from their direct familiarity with the provincial and urban poor. In this talk, Title VIII Research Scholar Helen Stuhr-Rommereim will focus on the work of author Fedor Reshetnikov, and how his writing contributed to a radically different view of Imperial Russian life: a pan-Imperial proletariat that crossed ethnic and confessional boundaries. Stuhr-Rommereim will explore how Reshetnikov’s sketches of the Russian Empire’s “common people” demonstrate the limits of class, rather than nation, as a frame for conceiving of a social collective.