Wang, Dissertation Abstract/TOC, 9/10/2015

Civic Feeling: Pushkin and the Decembrist Emotional Community

My dissertation offers a new approach to the Decembrists and especially
Decembrist poetry. I argue that the participants in the uprisings in December 1825 at
Senate Square and in Ukraine were not members of an organization with a defined
political program, but rather a loosely linked network, an emotional community focused
on Sentimentalist friendship. Significantly, although they formed their group as an
alternative to official culture, in some ways the community of the rebellious Decembrists
paradoxically mirrored the sentimental scenario of Alexander Is reign (see Richard
Wortman.). In this way it was distinct from the libertine community to which Alexander
Pushkin and most of his Lyceum classmates belonged. While these two groups
overlapped socially, their emotional worldviews differed, contributing to a troubled
understanding of the relationship between them. Focusing on this dynamic, I offer a new
interpretation of a key moment in Russian literature.
My understanding of emotional community derives from a notion developed by
historians William Reddy and Barbara Rosenwein. They apply it to groups with an
emotional framework that differed significantly from those of the official culture (or
emotional regime). I also draw on Yuri Lotmans concept of the Decembrist as a
specific behavioral type, but adjust it by focusing on emotion as a regulator of behavior.
By emotion, I refer to the emotional model that the Decembrists constructed and
followed, as distinct from the physiological affects that all humans experience. Focusing
on emotion allows me to connect Decembrist behavior to Decembrist literature, which in
this period had an explicitly emotive function. In addition to providing a new
understanding of the role literature, and especially poetry, played in this group, attention
to feeling also allows me to consider how and why certain key texts (like Pushkins
Volnost,) might have been understood differently in different communities.
The introduction and first chapter introduce my framework and discusses how the
Decembrist emphasis on friendship contrasts with the Lycean focus on sexual, flirtatious
love. Chapter Two examines a topic critical to the development of the community of
Decembrists, which developed in the aftermath of the War of 1812, by considering on the
themes of community, trauma, and war, and showing how the community described in
the previous chapter might be considered in an expanded military scenario linking
personal bonds to a sense of national community. The third chapter shows how this
community expanded even further to imaginatively encompass the entire Russian nation
and its history. More specifically, I examine how Kondratii Ryleev understood history
emotionally and how Pushkin responded critically to this understanding. In the final
chapter, I explore a topic often sidestepped by Soviet scholars by considering the role of
religion in the Decembrist community. Here, the notion of community retracts to consider
the concept of an individuals emotional relationship with God as an alternative to the
official notion of religion but, paradoxically, also it parallels Alexander Is Protestant
tendencies. The conclusion will consider the fate of the Decembrist community in exile
and the groups emotional influence on later thinkers.

Wang, Dissertation Abstract/TOC, 9/10/2015

Provisional Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Pushkin, the Decembrists, and the Politics of Friendship
3. The Brotherhood of Officers and Soldiers: War Poetry and the Decembrist
Emotional Community
4. Ryleev, Pushkin, and the Poeticization of Russian History
5. After the Apocalypse: The Decembrists and Christianity
6. Conclusion: The Decembrists Emotional Legacy