Charles H. Arndt

Charles Arndt is an Associate Professor of Russian language and literature at Vassar College. He received his PhD from Brown University, where he defended his dissertation entitled, “Dostoevsky’s Engagement of Russian Intellectuals in the Question of Russia and Europe: From Winter Notes on Summer Impressions to The Devils” (2004). He has written articles on Dostoevsky’s literary relationship to the work and persona of Nikolai Karamzin and Denis Fonvizin, on the novelist’s use of everyday objects in descriptions of fantastical events, and on religious wandering (strannichestvo) in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Adolescent. Arndt has also explored and written on religious wanderers as a theme in the works of several other nineteenth-century Russian authors and has completed his first book on the subject, titled “Our Common People Are a Vagrant Before Anything’: Wanderer-Pilgrims in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Literary Landscape, which was released by Slavica Publishers in November of 2024.

In connection with his interest in wandering and pilgrimage, Arndt looks at geographical conceptions of the sacred and their mythicization both in Russian literature and in the Russian press of the nineteenth century, a subject delt with in his co-authored article “Mapping Out Holy Rus’: The Formation of Sacred Geographies in [the journal] Russian Pilgrim” (2019). He also considers more broadly how nineteenth-century authors incorporate elements of Russia’s Orthodox Christian heritage into their fiction, which is the basis for his extensive article, titled “Making Saints Out of Soldiers: Nikolaj Leskov’s ‘Kadetskii Monastyr’ [The Cadet Monastery] and the Hagiographization of the Recent Past,” (2017), where he examines the ways in which one of the country’s leading nineteenth-century writers (though relatively unknown in the West) uses the genre of the Saint’s Vita, usually associated with ecclesial literature, to advance an idiosyncratic vision of righteousness.

Here at Vassar, Arndt teaches Elementary Russian, Dostoevsky and Psychology, and Vampires, Monks, and Holy Fools: The Mystical in Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the First-Year Writing Seminar, Russia and the Short Story. He has also taught The Russian Classics: The Great Realists of the Nineteenth Century, The Genius of Chekhov: Theatre and Tales, a Russian-language seminar on singer-songwriters, and has supervised numerous student research projects. As part of his classes, Arndt likes to play the guitar and sing in Russian and has organized a department band, named “Listopad” (meaning “falling leaves” in Russian and “November” in Ukrainian), which performs Russian, and, at times, Ukrainian, traditional and contemporary songs.