Jennifer Flaherty on the Conditions of the Working Class in Russia

A self-described “19th-century-ist,” Jennifer Flaherty’s scholarship covers multiple eras. An assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke, she focuses on the literature and intellectual history of 19th-century Russia, while tracing the longer philosophical and political traditions that shaped the period.

Her current project, which she presented during the tgiFHI speaker series, reevaluates what she refers to as the “Russian radical tradition”—a movement with Enlightenment roots that is frequently misinterpreted through the lens of the Cold War.

For Flaherty, that Cold War perspective continues to distort how scholars and the broader public understand Russian thought at the time. She argues Western scholarship often treated the radicals superficially because the Soviets took them as their darlings, which created the impression that there was nothing else left to say.

At the same time, these figures were flattened by Soviet-era academic frameworks that aligned mostly through party lines. “Every work began with ‘Lenin says this…Marx says this,” she explained. “Leaving little room to consider the more complex ideas that are actually present in the texts.”

These inherited contrasts between politics and literature, as well as between radicalism and the great novel, are challenged by Flaherty’s work. She points out that censorship prevented Russia in the 19th century from having a consistent tradition of published political essays.

More importantly however was that discussions about social reform, class, and power emerged through literature. “Literary criticism and literature were the means by which everything occurred,” Flaherty said. “The political nature of 19th-century Russian literature was what made it distinctive and fascinating.”

Her research focuses mostly on how writers depicted poverty, labor, and peasant life. And she argues that sentimentality has frequently plagued literature, resulting in tones that remove readers from the political realities being portrayed.

“It is a distancing. It likes to pretend that it is something that connects, but it can be very paternalistic and reproduces the hierarchies it pretends to criticize,” she explained.

Her work turns to lesser-known radical and populist writers of the 1860s and 1870s, including those involved in what Flaherty describes as “one of the first works of sociology.” These writers attempted to document conditions across Russia using extensive data but also storytelling, a combination she sees as important.  

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“You need the story, you need the feeling, and you need the data,” she said.

For her, this blend helps challenge the old separation between thought and feeling, one that continues to surface in contemporary discussions of empathy and political commitment. “Feeling is always involved with ideas. Solidarity is both a feeling and an idea.”

Flaherty’s interest in literature and politics emerged early on in her academic pursuits. Initially brought in by way of studying philosophy, she found that Russian novels allowed her to ask philosophical questions in a deeply grounded, historical way.

“Examining Russian literature was a way for me to do philosophy without doing philosophy,” she said. The more she read, the more she saw that the “big philosophical problems” she cared about were inseparable from political ones. That realization continues to shape her work today.

In the classroom, Flaherty often thinks about how students encounter literature and critical thought. She ultimately worries that students are entering college with strong presentation skills but less time for sustained reading and reflection.

“There’s this overemphasis on presentation in the absence of content,” she shared.

There is also the growing concern about how universities are adopting AI tools. “Students are very eager to engage with and develop critical thought, and it seems to me they’re faced with a lot of things directing their attention elsewhere,” she explained.

Still, Flaherty stays focused on helping students and readers alike see literature as a site where political, emotional, ethical, and philosophical questions meet, often in surprising and contradictory ways.

“Works of literature are exciting because they offer little pockets of radical conclusions,” she said. “Those same complexities are exactly what make 19th-century Russian literature vital today.”