In “Russian Wanderer in the Post-Soviet Space: Homelessness in Ilichevsky’s
Matisse,” Jordan examines Aleksandr Ilichevsky’s conceptualization of homelessness
as a state of existential not belonging that beset the author and his peers when the
Soviet system collapsed in the early 1990s. The novel’s protagonist mitigates his
metaphorical…[Read more]

In his final novel, Virgin Soil (1877), Turgenev takes up the theme of the particular kind of populism (Narodnichestvo) that swept across the European part of Russia in the 1860s and 70s. Critics on both ends of the political spectrum believed that Virgin Soil failed to truthfully depict the populist movement; however, the novel provides an…[Read more]