Professional Affiliation

Professor of History, Northwestern University

Wilson Center Project

From Naturalism to Modernism: Literature, Ideology, and Science in Russia and France

Project Summary

Analysis of leftist reactions to works of Zola, Checkhov, and other major writers in Russia and France from the 180s to the 1960s to confront these questions: Why has the left disapproved the literary avant-garde more often than not? What light does this comparative history of Russian and French experience shed on differentt ypes of the claim to know human realities--the literary, the ideological, and the scientific types? What are the interacting effects of ideas and social contexts, with special attention to varieties of Marxism and of modernist literature?

Previous Terms

September 1977 - June 1978, Psychology and Neurophysiology in Russia from the 1860s to the 1950s