Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the Nineteenth Century by Gabriella Safran (review)

Abstract

family itself, and in particular on the contrasting treatment of brotherhood in the English and Russian novel. Part Two turns to ‘the historical factors that shaped the marriage plot’ (p. 21), with three chapters devoted to ideas about gender roles, the nature of courtship, and a particular Russian interest in the shortcomings of marriage as an institution. The two chapters constituting Part Three set aside conventional understandings of the family to address alternative models of kinship that go beyond blood and marriage, embracing instead ‘new kinds of family configurations’ (p. 23). If Berman’s overarching methodological claims lend her work its heuristic clarity, then her individual readings evince greater complexity and nuance. Alongside adroit and thoughtful readings of canonical family novels by Austen, Dickens and Trollope on the English side, and Tolstoi, Dostoevskii and Turgenev on the Russian, there are discussions of less familiar authors, particularly women. If female novelists have long been central to the English novel and its reputation, then Berman — generously building on the work of earlier generations of pioneering feminist critics — continues the important task of restoring writers such as Khvoshchinskaia and Tur to the canon. Some of the most productive readings proposed by Berman are those in which she draws on queer theory in order to arrive at a more complex and reflective understanding of relationship within and beyond the nuclear family. As she writes in her conclusion, ‘the nineteenth-century family novel can be a conservative story of marriage and reproductive fertility, but it can also be a story of breaking with the past and embracing the messy and unfinalizable present’ (p. 233). It is, perhaps, this gently disruptive spirit that best characterizes The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1800. At a time when ‘traditional values’ are vigorously promoted by politicians around the globe and the nuclear family is vaunted as the essential building block of stable societies, Berman’s study reminds us of the messy contingency of human relations and the power of fiction to allow us to imagine alternative ways of understanding what really constitutes fellow feeling.