Join us on October 27, 2026, at 3:30 PM PT for the first Sawchen lecture of 2026-2027.
Focusing on the theme of ‘fragments’, CENES welcomes Dr. Lindsay Ceballos from Lafayette College.
This lecture is part of the North American Dostoevsky Society’s virtual speaker series.
Abstract
In the years leading up to and during the momentous reforms of the 1860s, the Russian educated class was preoccupied with their country’s “civilizational” status. These debates reflected the intelligentsia’s hope that the emancipation of the serfs would ensure Russia’s future prosperity, as much as they engaged with cutting-edge approaches to social science in Europe, such as Henry Thomas Buckle’s multi-volume History of Civilization in England (1857), first published in Russian in 1861, and the work of statistician Adolphe Quetelet. But the conversation about Russia’s status as a civilized nation had begun much earlier in Russia—with Chadaaev’s Philosophical Letters—and even earlier, in the previous century, in Western Europe. In Inventing Eastern Europe, the historian Larry Woolf has shown that the concept of “Eastern Europe” emerged from the Enlightenment invention of civilization, which was projected onto lands perceived as “semi-barbaric,” part of an imagined geography to the east.
In the 1860s, from the conservative Slavophiles to the radical materialists led by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, what “civilization” meant was often implicitly a point of endless and often vitriolic disagreements over policy, ideas, and worldview. This talk places Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment into this intellectual context, examining the fragmentary and seemingly insignificant references to the Orient in the novel. Crime and Punishment has been viewed by the author himself and subsequent critics as highly, even preternaturally responsive to the volatile time in which it was serialized in The Russian Herald (1865–66). In this talk, I will argue that understanding the Oriental fragments in the novel hinges on reengaging it with little explored polemics in the first part of the decade in which Russia’s civilization or barbarism were either directly or obliquely at issue. Ultimately, I seek to understand Raskolnikov’s guiding idea in the novel in relation to contemporary discourse about Russia’s place as a developing nation between the modernizing West and the “backward” East.
About the speaker
Lindsay Ceballos is Associate Professor of Russian and East European Studies. She is the author of Reading Faithfully: Russian Modernist Criticism and the Making of Dostoevsky, 1881–1917 (2025) and the forthcoming volume of translated essays with co-editors Chloë Kitzinger and D. Brian Kim, Tolstoy & Dostoevsky in Russian Symbolist Criticism: A Reader (November 2026).
How to attend
This lecture is an online event, and takes place on October 27, 2026, at 3:30 PM PT. Attendees must register for the Zoom Webinar ahead of time. Please note that this is a recorded event.
