“The Book of Boredom”

Abstract This article examines a particular historical moment as the dramatic events of the Napoleonic Wars were concluding at the Congress of Vienna, through the way in which it was reflected and refracted in the personal writings of a future Decembrist, Nikolai Turgenev. The analysis ensues from the juxtaposition of rapid historical change taking place on the ground, the European peace congress in which Turgenev was an active participant and which would soon be celebrated as the foundational peace framework of the nineteenth century, and the deep melancholy that permeates his diary entries written over this period. Employing a psychoanalytic understanding of melancholy as a type of mourning, and a melancholic as a figure outside of time, this article engages with the diary as “an archive of loss” and as a mechanism by which the “working-through” of the melancholic state takes place. By the end of this ninth diary book, Turgenev was poised to return home as a “radical melancholic,” still a melancholic but now able to act and ready to engage in political work for the happiness of Russia.