The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880 by Anna A. Berman (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880 by Anna A. Berman
• Renata Goroshkova (bio)

Anna A. Berman. The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800–1880. Oxford UP, 2023. Pp. x + 272. $101.99. ISBN 978-0-19-286662-2 (hb).

Berman explains the relevance and importance of this book by the fact that she is fighting against the "aesthetic racism" that, in the words of Elaine Freedgood, "has placed the British and French nineteenth-century novel at the masterful, still center of […] novel history" (qtd. 5), and confronting the unfairness of forgetting dominant literary figures. For, "one could hardly claim that Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev were not important contributors to the nineteenth-century novel tradition" (5). The book was written, obviously, before the recent events began, but being released in the middle of speculations about the cancelling of Russian culture, and on the background of rumors about the exclusion of Dostoevsky's novels from the curricula of American Universities, it becomes a heartening ray of sanity, revealing a unique perspective on how literature of both the British and the Russian empires digested and problematized social questions of their time, developing defensive mechanisms against toxic ideology and deleterious beliefs.

Berman studies novels in the context of family history through the lens of different aspects of life, from laws related to family matters to the changing role of women in society, making a parallel between the family and the State: "Viewed in this context, the depictions of family in the novels take on greater social and political weight. The pervasiveness of the theme of tyrannical fathers and patriarchal oppression could be understood as the closest authors could come to critiquing the autocracy" (13–14). The society that is formed under a certain type of state government directly affects the ways in which families are created in this society, which, according to Berman, is overtly manifested in the structure of novels: "family structure is indeed a crucial determinant of the plotlines each nation embraced" (88). By understanding another and seeing the world from their perspective, we can learn more about ourselves, therefore, and the comparative aspect can be considered the main advantage of the book. Berman masterfully and convincingly compares the English and the Russian family structure that forms the novel space – "the English had a linear model of family that focused on genealogy, origins, and descent, while the Russians were much more interested in all the family in the here and now" (2) – and draws far-reaching conclusions: "The English focus on futurity versus the Russian emphasis on the present can be explained by a more fundamental distinction between the two societies: stability, or lack thereof" (36).

This remarkable study of the family novel is multifaceted and provides the deepest insight into various cultural and historical matters related to the family in both countries. Berman explains how and why the content of [End Page 497] the concept "family" was changing over time in Russia and England, what was the reason for the increasing importance of surnames, and why family portraiture, pedigrees and heirlooms became wildly fashionable in Victorian England. Her knowledge of Russian history is exceptionally profound, as she demonstrates while, for example, elaborating on the role of the instability of the political order in forming "the absentee-owner mentality" (38, quoting John Randolph), or explaining why the Russians were against the Law of Single Inheritance and "the nobles were not trying to increase their capital to enhance the prestige of their heirs" (35), finding out what was a more pliable strategy for family survival in Russia. She brilliantly analyses the formation of the Russian national character and how writers understood the essence of Russianness, paying specific attention to the importance of brotherly love (quoting Dostoevsky – "To become a real Russian … means just […] to become a brother to all people, a panhuman, if you like" [79]), the idea that would later be vulgarized and utilized for propaganda purposes – in the same fashion as happened with the ideas of Nietzsche and Wagner in Nazi Germany.

As a specialist in Russian Literature, Berman focuses on the interconnectedness of the Russian mentality with the Christian (Orthodox) worldview, and I find...