Summary: The French Realist manifesto of 1840, Les français peints par eux-mêmes, and its Russian copy of 1841 (Russians portrayed from nature by Russians) call for the modern writer to portray the manners and mores of the times and act as a local historian. Dostoevsky and Flaubert take up this call inflected through a more sophisticated model of history, subsequently theorized by Foucault (under impulses from Nietzsche) as genealogy or as “effective history” which focuses on “emergence, the moment of arising.” Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) and Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent (1875) will be analysed as ‘documents’ capturing a ‘moment in time’ staging themselves as ‘writing’ or as a language game of domination and interpretation. Millicent Vladiv-Glover is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies. Her publications include Narrative Principles in Dostoevsky’s Devils: A Structural Analysis, (1979), Lirska drama slovenskog modernizma (1997), Russian Postmodernism (1999) and Romani Dostojesvkog kao Diskurs Transgresije i Pozude (2001).
