Academics at Work: Researching Russian with Victoria Thorstensson

“We think that we’re living in a new world where everything is just happening for the first time,” says Victoria Thorstensson, lecturer in Russian, “whereas history and literature teaches us that most problems, most developments, are kind of spiraling through history. If we understand what was going on in nineteenth-century Russia, it’s not too far away from what is going on in the contemporary world. These ideological and cultural wars that are happening now in America, for example — to study something similar in the nineteenth century is productive. It gives us an angle on what is happening now.”

Thorstensson’s research is on nineteenth-century Russian literature, focusing on midcentury polemical novels, which were written to support a worldview in contemporary society and deconstruct opposing views. Polemical novels were how prominent minds processed Russian society, and put them in dialogue not just with each other, but also with worldwide scientific and intellectual developments. Russia was undergoing rapid change at that point in time, and scientific advances like Darwin’s theory of evolution were shaking up Russian society.

“I work with all kinds of writers,” Thorstensson said. “Some were radicals or revolutionaries. They wrote about a very positive image of an incoming hero — ‘the nihilist’ or the ‘new man.’ Some writers were conservatives [meaning they supported the monarchy and were resistant to change]. For them, it was all about critiquing what the liberals [meaning those who supported change] were portraying. Finally, some writers just did their own thing, like Dostoevsky. They had their philosophical ideas and wanted to engage with the time, but on their own terms. [All these types of writers tackled] questions about peasants and serfdom, the end of serfdom, the education of peasants, the reform that gave peasants land. Women’s rights was also a huge thing, because Russia was the vanguard of women’s rights at the time. In the 1860s women were, briefly, allowed to attend universities, and a lot of Russian women after that moved to Europe and became scientists.”

This, Thorstensson says, is when the Russian novel reaches its height.

“All the major Russian novelists responded to their political situations,” Thorstensson said. “Ivan Turgenev, who was actually the most popular writer of them all in the nineteenth century, lived in Germany and France for many years, representing Russian literature abroad. He had this very acute sensitivity to the time, so he actually often covered events before Dostoevsky or Tolstoy. Then there is a very interesting novelist called Nikolai Leskov, with whom my journey in this scholarship direction started, because I wanted to work with him.”

But, Thorstensson stresses, her work also takes her down fascinating roads to work with much lesser-known authors.

“When the genius is on the surface of his own realm, producing great literature,” she said, “the minor writers are actually making certain character types and plots more visible — and not many people know about them. I’m also interested in, broadly, the literary cultural sphere as a kind of lived, multifaceted phenomenon, so I look to minor writers for that reason.”

Journey into academia

Having originally studied English literature in Russia before immigrating to the United States, Thorstensson wanted to continue her studies. Jumping into some comparative literature and Russian history, she was eventually recommended to apply to comparative literature and Slavic studies programs. She enrolled in the University of Wisconsin’s Slavic languages and literature program, where she earned her PhD.

“My dissertation was on nihilism and Russian polemic novels of the 1860s to the 1880s,” Thorstensson said. “After that, my research just branched out in different directions from that dissertation, which was big in scope.”

Thorstensson taught Russian as a graduate assistant at the University of Wisconsin before becoming a lecturer at Yale. She then taught at the University of Pennsylvania, worked two summers at Middlebury College’s summer immersion program, and worked eight years at Nazarbayev University, one of the premier research universities of Central Asia. 

“It was a great experience,” said Thorstensson. “Wonderful colleagues. Lots of movement and very positive energy. We had wonderful students.”

Thorstensson now, of course, teaches at Carleton, where she said the ability to walk out into nature anytime, the interlibrary loan system, and summer research opportunities help her continue her work. Through all of that, Thorstensson’s research has branched into some new and unexpected directions.

“I got acquainted with a poet who wrote about Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan,” Thorstensson said, “and I thought that was such awesome poetry. It’s a long-term scholarly, professional relationship, and now together with a colleague, I am his translator. We translate this contemporary Kazakhstani poet, who is queer and very politically and socially engaged. We’ve received invitations to conferences. Just last week, I gave a guest lecture at Sewanee: The University of the South about the poet and our translations. In the past years, we read this poetry and spoke about it at Harvard too.”

Thorstensson’s proudest publication so far has been a chapter in the book Reading Darwin in Imperial Russia, where she focuses on how even the translation of Darwin’s writings itself was political and influenced its reception: “Anti-Darwinism as Anti-Nihilism: The Conservative Response to Darwinism in Mikhail Katkov’s Russian Messenger and The Moscow News and Boleslav Markevich’s Pedagogical Romance Marina from Alyrog.”

“Let’s start with natural selection,” Thorstensson said. “When you translate a term like ‘selection,’ there would be many synonyms that all would respond to the question, ‘Who selects?’ Is it a random process, which would get us to the core of Darwin’s theory? Or is it the way that it was translated in the first Russian translations: избраны, which means ‘the chosen,’ like the chosen few, the same thing as in the Bible. There are religious overtones and the notion of someone selecting. With that one choice, the entire theory gets spun differently.”

Current work and research

“I’m writing a book on Boleslav Markevich. He’s a fascinating writer, whom contemporaries [that liked his work] thought to be a genius higher than Tolstoy,” Thorstensson said. “He was a conservative writer, so he represented a whole conservative direction in Russian literature; an alternative to liberal or revolutionary Russian literature.”

Thorstensson’s research on Markevich started entirely by accident. One day, while she was studying at Yale’s research library, she stumbled upon a nineteenth-century edition of Markevich’s collected works that had notes left in the margins. She was immediately intrigued, not just because she had never heard of Markevich before, but also by the book’s origins.

“How did this collection get into the Yale library?” Thorstensson said she asked herself. “Probably Russian emigres, since there were many after the revolution who came to America. [They] obviously couldn’t bring a lot, but somehow they brought this collected edition of Boleslav Markevich, and I thought, ‘That must have meant something to this person.’ I kept asking questions and imagining that [some White Army] officer somehow smuggled Boleslav Markevich out of burning Russia.”

For a writer who was so well-regarded by his contemporaries, why has he fallen out of historical favor? Why the need to be smuggled out of Russia in the first place? Thorstensson explained that after the Russian Civil War, history was rewritten and Markevich, who was a staunch conservative, was forgotten.

“He was not mentioned or taught, but somewhere in the heart of that [White Army] officer, he was still alive,” Thorstensson said.

Part of Thorstensson’s research on Markevich took her to Moscow, where she was able to look at what was kept in the archive of The Russian Messenger, the journal that Markevich was published in.

“Mikhail Katkov, the editor of that literary journal, was also an influential political figure,” Thorstensson said, “because he thought that his journal was the main tribune for public opinion and debate. He got so influential that he was directly influencing policy, so he was consulted by ministers and the government. He was very interested in how to stop the revolution, how to stop these young people from plotting. His answer to that was: we need an educational reform.”

Thorstensson learned in a series of letters between Markevich and Katkov that Russian conservatives pioneered a wide-reaching educational reform that would only teach math, Latin, and Greek — subjects that they considered to encourage patriotism and were good for the soul — as opposed to physics, biology, and chemistry, which they claimed lead people to communism.

“[Those letters] are the only source of information about my writer, and it’s all political gossip,” Thorstensson said. “I have to fish for literary things. And now, I can’t get into the Moscow archives because of [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine] and my affiliation with an American university.”

Advice for students

“Always do what you like,” Thorsetensson said. “There aren’t many academic jobs, if you want to go to grad school, but if something exists that you are passionate about, you should absolutely do it. This is not advice that brings money, but advice that brings fulfillment.”

For Carls who are interested in her particular subject, Thorstensson invites everyone to start with RUSS 101: Elementary Russian. 

“Explore the resources that are available here while you pursue your own interests,” Thorstensson said. “I remember when we were in the Soviet Union beginning to learn English, if we found a piece of paper with English writing on it, that was a window into the world.”

In Winter 2026, Thorstensson is teaching RUSS 239: The Warped Soul of Putin’s Russia, which is on contemporary Russian literature and culture from the 1990s to 2025. She also teaches RUSS 244: Rise of the Russian Novel. Aside from Thorstensson’s courses, the Russian department offers RUSS 266: Brothers Karamazov and RUSS 267: War and Peace, both focusing on extremely influential Russian novels. Plus, the department has an annual off-campus studies (OCS) trip to Kazakhstan, in addition to many other Carleton OCS options in the Baltic states and Caucuses that teach not just Russian, but also international relations, politics, and more.

While she loves her research, Thorstensson also loves her job as a teacher — as all Carleton faculty do.

“I love my students very much,” she said. “I love their curiosity. That’s why I’m in this profession. I enjoy sharing what I know and what inspires me with my students, and it’s great when they start to get inspired.”

This story is part of a series of interviews with Carleton faculty about their research and engagements with the Carleton community. The Academics at Work series allows Carleton professors to talk about the changes they have observed and help lead in their own academic communities, as well as provide further insight into the work they do at Carleton.