Intersecting Worlds: Animal Minds, Knowledge, and Narrative in Eastern European Fiction

This dissertation proceeds from the observation that animal point of view is pervasive in Slavic fiction and asks what imagining animal consciousness and perception allows us to see that we otherwise could not. Intersecting Worlds uses close readings to articulate the mechanisms of conveying animal perception, drawing on the insights of narratology and cognitive literary studies—especially Dorrit Cohn’s taxonomy of representations of mental phenomena, with particular emphasis on the interactions between animal and human minds. This dissertation ultimately identifies unexpected similarity in the reasons for deployment of animal minds in works from different periods: an epistemological function for animals, in which they reveal the limitations of any knowledge or individual perspective.The dissertation is divided into four chapters that follow these representations from the realist period to the current day. My first chapter traces the trajectory of animal perspective through Tolstoy’s works in War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and “Kholstomer,” to show how, despite an evolution in artistic technique and an ambivalence about animality as a concept, Tolstoy is consistent in his use of animals to reveal an underlying natural and divine truth that his “seeker” characters struggle to glimpse. In my second chapter, I analyze a selection of Chekhov’s short fiction, including “At the Wolf Baiting,” “Kashtanka,” “An Incident,” “Gusev,” and “Whitebrow,” to show how animal Umwelt is an important component of what I call his poetics of alienation. My third chapter complicates conventional allegorical readings of Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, arguing that Bulgakov uses the animal mind to demonstrate the inscrutability of all minds and satirize epistemological certainty of all types, a fact which I make emphasize by reading the text against the importance of psychological science in the 1920s. My final chapter considers the way in which the profusion of animals in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian fiction borrows from this tradition to identify truth in a post-Soviet, postmodern, post-truth world, focusing on extended readings of Victoria Amelina’s Dom’s Dream Kingdom and Linor Goralik’s Bobo.