Reading Sterne in Stalin’s Russia

This talk discusses the 1920s and 1930s as a critical juncture in the Russian reception of Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces how an eighteenth-century Yorkshire writer was read and admired within an increasingly totalitarian society, and places these encounters within their biographical, cultural, and institutional settings. The talk shows how Sterne’s whimsical world—so alien to the Bolshevik vision of society—became, precisely through this incongruity, a revealing lens on early Soviet cultural life.