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Speakers): Jacob Emery (Indiana University, Bloomington)

In Yuri Olesha’s 1927 novel Envy, the reactionary Ivan Babichev accuses his estranged brother, a communist technocrat and director of a state cafeteria, of dreaming to “wipe away from the little faces of your babies their resemblance to you--that holy, beautiful, family resemblance.” The accusation that communal nourishment will destroy the biological family is rooted in contemporary efforts to displace genealogical kinship in favor of relatedness through shared economic substance, most importantly breast milk (the nursing infant being the last stand of the bourgeois family and the primal instance of production and consumption). This presentation will examine how figurative kinships like that created by milk inform the rhetorical structures of aesthetic texts, notably Envy and Ivan Bunin’s 1912 novella Dry Valley.