Description
Book SynopsisImperial Russia's large wolf populations were demonized, persecuted, tormented, and sometimes admired.
That Savage Gaze explores the significance of wolves in pre-revolutionary Russia utilizing the perspectives of cultural studies, ecocriticism, and human-animal studies. It examines the ways in which hunters, writers, conservationists, members of animal protection societies, scientists, doctors, government officials and others contested Russia's "Wolf Problem" and the particular threat posed by rabid wolves. It elucidates the ways in which wolves became intertwined with Russian identity both domestically and abroad. It argues that wolves played a foundational role in Russians' conceptions of the natural world in ways that reverberated throughout Russian society, providing insights into broader aspects of Russian culture and history as well as the opportunities and challenges that modernity posed for the Russian empire.
Trade Review“Although Ian Helfant teaches Russian literature and language at Colgate University, That Savage Gaze presents the reader with a historical narrative: a shift in depictions of wolves in Russian literature during the Golden and Silver Ages, and especially in those isolated moments when human characters look directly into the eyes of wild animals. … Helfant provides scholars with an illuminating instance when literature, medicine, and environmental ethics converged, leading to surprising outcomes.” —Stephen Brain, Mississippi State University, the Russian Review Vol. 78, No. 3
-- Stephen Brain * The Russian Review *
“Minutely researched and grippingly presented, with vivid illustrations, That Savage Gaze is a fine example of ecocriticism: as representations of wolves lend us insight into the context of nineteenth-century Russian society, we follow Russian writers’ struggles to see the world through lupine eyes. It’s time to reintroduce the wolf, and other threatened species, to Russian Studies.” —Muireann Maguire, University of Exeter, Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 79, No. 3
-- Muireann Maguire * Slavonic and East European Review *
Table of Contents
- A Note on Translation and Transliteration
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Harnessing the Domestic to Confront the Wild: Borzoi Wolf Hunting and Masculine Aggression in War and Peace
- Chapter 2 The Rise of Hunting Societies, the Professionalization of Wolf Expertise, and the Legal Sanctioning of Predator Control with Guns and Poison
- Chapter 3 Chekhov's "Hydrophobia," Kuzminskaya's "The Rabid Wolf," and the Fear of Bestial Madness on the Eve of Pasteur's Panacea
- Chapter 4 Fissures in the Flock: Wolf Hounding, the Humane Society, and the Literary Redemption of a Feared Predator
- Conclusion
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
