Lost Detectives: Early Russian Crime Fiction, Visual Adaptation, and the Art of Waiting

Description

According to Susan Sweeney, ‘in its formal elements, such as sequence, suspense, and closure, as well as in content, the detective story dramatizes the workings of narrative itself’. Although late nineteenth-century examples of Russophone crime fiction differ in some significant respects from the archetypal detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle envisaged by Sweeney, they nevertheless provide fertile ground on which to consider the impact of storytelling devices. This paper, in two complementary parts, will examine the role of narrative focalisation, temporal organisation and information gaps in works of late imperial Russian crime fiction and their adaptation. In the first part, Claire Whitehead will discuss Aleksandra Sokolova’s 1890 novel, Without a Trace, and the various ways in which it exploits diegetic devices to explore issues related to the marginalisation and brutalisation of women in a patriarchal society. In the second part, Carol Adlam will discuss her graphic novel The Russian Detective (Penguin Books, 2024), a free adaptation of Semyon Panov’s 1872 novel, Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball, and a response to the genre of early crime fiction more broadly. Carol will discuss her deployment of varied visual codes as analogues to the original text’s devices of digression, hesitation, and suspense.

Period	13 Mar 2024
Held at	New York University, United States, New York
Degree of Recognition	International