Sternean Entanglements: Laurence Sterne and Early Soviet Culture

Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy (1759-61) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), was an unlikely object of sustained interest in Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, his writings found avid readers and admirers throughout the 1920s and 1930s, across a period of profound changes in literary institutions and intellectual life. Sterne could be claimed in the 1920s as an experimental writer and “revolutionary of form”; by the 1930s, when such claims had become increasingly difficult to sustain, interest in his work intensified rather than disappeared, while the terms on which he was read changed. This lecture follows the histories of particular books and readers, moving between well-known intellectuals and figures largely absent from literary history. Sterne’s Soviet afterlives offer a way of considering reading as a practice of self-fashioning and of asking how such practices contributed to forms of intellectual autonomy after the Revolution. This event is sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Levan Institute for the Humanities.