Madame de Genlis dans la littérature russe du XIXe siècle : Pouchkine, Léon Tolstoï et autres

Alla Polosina; Alicia C. Montoya

doi:10.18352/relief.854

Madame de Genlis in 19th-century Russian literature: Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and others

Author(s)

Alla Polosina
Alicia C. Montoya

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/relief.854

Keywords:

Reception, moralism, nicknames, popularity, bibliophile culture

Abstract

In this article we examine the reception of Madame de Genlis by several nineteenth-century Russian authors. Pushkin called her “a scribbler without talent”, despite the fact that her Mémoires interested him greatly. Leo Tolstoy used Madame de Genlis’ name in War and Peace to underscore the character of his protagonists, Kutuzov and Vera Rostova. Leskov wrote a little masterpiece, “The Spirit of Madame de Genlis”, on her deification in high society. Madame de Genlis’ Russian reception appears to be closely related to the aristocratic status of her oeuvre, that for a century served as a cultural model for Francophile Russian elites.

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Author Biographies

Alla Polosina

Alla Polosina, PhD, is an associate researcher at the National Tolstoy museum Iasnaïa Poliana. Her research focuses primarily on Leo Tolstoy and the Enlightenment and on comparative literature. She has published over a hundred articles in Russian, French, English and Greek. In addition, she has obtained fellowships from the Universities of Paris IV-Sorbonne and the Foundation for Fundamental Research of Russia. Her latest publication is “Tolstoï et les philosophes français du XVIIIe siècle sur le pouvoir” (Cahiers Léon Tolstoï 23, 2013).
Alicia C. Montoya

Alicia C. Montoya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen. She is the author of Marie-Anne Barbier et la tragédie post-classique (Champion, 2007), Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Boydell & Brewer, 2013) and has co-edited volumes on Enlightenment and History (Champion, 2010), Women Writing Back / Writing Women Back (Brill, 2010) and Early Modern Medievalisms (Brill, 2010).

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Published

2013-07-13

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2013): Madame de Genlis and Enlightenment thought

Section

Articles - thematic dossier

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

Polosina, A. and Montoya, A.C. (2013) “Madame de Genlis in 19th-century Russian literature: Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and others”, RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 7(1), pp. 123–140. doi:10.18352/relief.854.