SLAV Lecture

The Department of
Slavic Languages and Literaturescordially invites you to a talk byStephen H. BlackwellUniversity of Tennessee
"Allegories of Knowledge in
Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Nabokov" Monday, February 14, 2011

 5:15-6:45 pm

 Dogwood Room, IMU

The question of how, and how well, humans know their world has been a central, if hidden, question of artistic representation since at least the early nineteenth century.  The matter rose to special prominence, although still philosophically concealed, with the rise of Realism, and later, of materialist and socialist Realism.  The Russian literary tradition offers a series of fascinating perspectives on the process of how artists envision and represent human knowledge and its uses; as a corollary, this tradition also presents a study of how art itself participates in and embodies human knowledge.  In this talk I explore figurations of knowledge in Tolstoy's Sevastopol Tales, Chekhov's "The Black Monk," and, at greater length, in Nabokov's "A Visit to the Museum."  Each of these works foregrounds a different set of potentials and problems within human knowledge and in art as knowledge.  Each author recognizes the definitive limits on knowledge of the empirical world, against a background of humanity's drive to know more and more and a history of scientific advancement.   These works contribute vitally to an understanding of how human beings function as sensing, empirically knowing entities. They also offer themselves as tentative correctives to the sometimes overstated claims of documentary and scientific knowledge.   They embody the way that art enables individuals to know the world more carefully and less categorically. ALL ARE INVITED!