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1. What do you associate with 'romanticism' in general?

For me Romanticism is about an aesthetic confrontation with loss. The loss of one’s homeland, of childhood innocence, an ideal romantic love, a connection with Nature – these are the foundational themes of Romanticism. It is for this reason that the major Romantic genres are the elegy, the idyll, and the ballad. The elegy meditates on loss through the poetic figuration of an absent beloved object. The idyll seeks escape from the fragmented and painful experience of modernity via an imagined return to a lost (personal, national, mythic, and/or biblical) paradise. The ballad posits a recouped connection to orality, folk narratives, and the medieval past. Whether the dominant mood is one of rebellion (Prometheus and Satan as figures for the Romantic poet), grief (the grief of the exile or the spurned lover), or philosophical irony (the self as eternally split and unknowable to itself), Romanticism’s defining characteristic is its determination to figure—and provide an aesthetic compensation for—loss.   

2. What exactly did you deal with in your master's thesis? How did you deal with the phenomenon of 'romanticism' in your research project?

My current research traces the development of new literary forms in Russia between the failure of the Decembrist Uprising in 1825 and the ascendancy of proto-realism in the 1840s. I argue that this period of intense experimentation with literary forms was motivated by the late Romantics’ desire to expand literature’s capacity for embodiment, to push past material form’s perceived limits to represent nonmaterial or ideal truths. I trace the aesthetic strategies devised to overcome inherited Romantic dualisms (not only materiality/ideality, but also presence/absence, wholeness/fragmentation, fiction/reality) in texts of key prose writers of the 1830s – Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Odoevskii, and Mikhail Lermontov. I demonstrate that all three writers employ metafictive interarts devices—what I call “metaforms”—that draw on the realms of the visual arts, music, and theater, and which encode new formal possibilities. Resisting the realist teleology dominant in Slavic studies to this day, my dissertation redescribes the 1830s and 40s, not as merely “transitional,” but rather as a distinct moment whose formal innovations lie outside standard accounts of either Romanticism or realism.

3. In the Graduate School' Model Romance', it is assumed that romance has model-forming qualities. Can you do anything with it?

I am particularly interested in the aesthetic and formal models that arose during the Romantic era. In general I view these models as confrontations with or figurations of absence and loss. However, my dissertation project seeks to identify fleeting moments of presence and plenitude in the works of late Russian Romantics that run counter to this more general tendency to model absence, deficiency, and lack.