“All Sorts” of Fires: Suvorin’s Roman-Feuilleton Vsiakie and the Russian Polemical Novel of the 1860s

Abstract

This article discusses Aleksei Suvorin’s revisions of his 1865 series of feuilletons “Vsiakie” (“All Sorts”). Originally published in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (Saint-Petersburg News) as the beginning of a roman-feuilleton, they were reworked into a polemical novel of the same name, which was censored and burnt in the wake of Karakozov’s attempted assassination of Alexander II on 4 April 1866. The author analyzes Suvorin’s edits and revisions through the prism of their critical readings by the Censorship Department and the Ministry of the Interior. Examining the politically “untrustworthy” aspects of Vsiakie, the censor raised questions about the connections between the genres of the feuilleton, roman-feuilleton and the polemical novel. In particular, the censor’s reading touched upon the problem of the authorial position, the reduced distance between fiction and life, and the existence of numerous structural and thematic links between various polemical novels of that period. In the case of Vsiakie, therefore, the censor acted as a peculiar institution of literary criticism. Its critical readings can be not only relevant to the analysis of Vsiakie, but also instrumental for an understanding of the poetics and ideology of the polemical novel of the 1860s.