Proposal for a panel on

A recent onslaught of polemics regarding  Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, among other Slavic writers, is now riding the Internet. Alongside the question of literacy ’s (d)evolution is the question of how popular  and memetic representations deploy and reduce scholarly reverence so that, for example, Dostoevsky/ Bakhtin scholars  such as Gary Saul Morson and Anit Kodobobo[1] have recently had to defend Dostoevsky against internet cancel calls over his Christian nationalism. While Tolstoy remains the Russian writer who retains symbolic capital among Russian writers online, outpacing references to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy is also mocked among Right wing bloggers as a “troublemaker undermining conventional values.” The good news for reception theory is that a YouTube film clip debating Tolstoy’s moral/immoral compass has hundreds of thousands of views. The more problematic influence of Internet literary sites is that Chekhov is represented as more relatable (and a shorter read) than the “two bearded men” (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) who are accused of pounding their readers with spiritual heaviness. Who imposes political suffering on whom and how is this authorized politically by Russian classics, particularly in countries such as the U.S. where even “great novels” are treated as transactional?

[1] "Reading Dostoevsky Now, from the Margins"