Grigoryan , Bella Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 347 place in all libraries that have a place for books about Jewish life including antisemitism, and the literature and history of Belarus. London Arnold McMillin Grigoryan, Bella. Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762– 1861. Studies of the Harriman Institute. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2018. ix + 189 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.00 (paperback). Starting with discussion of reflections by the youthful Lev Tolstoi on the Instruction produced by Catherine II for the Legislative Commission she convoked in 1767, Bella Grigoryan considers the evolution of Russian ideas about the relationship between the nobility and the autocratic state over the century between Catherine’s accession to the throne in 1762 and the abolition of serfdom in 1861. She links this evolution to the gradual emergence of the Russian novelistic tradition, aiming in the process to ‘chart and interpret the rise of the Russian novel in relation to the political, legal, and cultural definitions that accrued to the nobility as a social estate’ (p. 4). This endeavour entails study of the interplay, in various cross-pollinating forms of writing, between the notions of subject and citizen and of the search for definitions of noble identity with which, Grigoryan rightly contends, many Russian writers were preoccupied. It is a corollary of the author’s findings that imperial Russia suffered less than has often been supposed from the relative underdevelopment of a civil public sphere. Certain ‘institutional cores’ of Russian civil society (p. 9), such as the press, the gentleman’s club, the noble assembly, voluntary associations and indeed imaginative literature, she maintains, were less at odds with the polity than much historiography on the Russian intelligentsia leads us to believe. Grigoryan provides a dense introductory chapter in which she examines the development of the nobleman’s sense of himself as gentleman farmer as this concept emerged in the pages of Novikov’s satirical journals and in writings by Fedor Rostopchin, Andrei Bolotov, Nikolai Karamzin and others. She also helpfully explores here the use of the letter as both a private genre and a tool for the ‘rhetorical construction of a public’ (p. 17). There follow chapters devoted to unfinished short prose works by Alexander Pushkin, including his novel Dubrovskii, Faddei Bulgarin’s Ivan Vyzhigin (1829), Nikolai Gogol´’s Dead Souls (especially its incomplete second part), Ivan Goncharov’s three novels, A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859) and The Precipice (1869), and Sergei Aksakov’s nostalgic Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson (1858). A place is SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 348 also found in the conclusion for brief discussion of Anna Karenina (1875–77), where Tolstoi paints, in his character Levin, what is perhaps the definitive portrait of the landowner who retires to the gentry’s private rural world. The diverse texts Grigoryan considers, which range from works of prose fiction to examples of non-fictional prose such as manuals on agriculture, conduct and housekeeping, respond to the insecurity of noble rights and status in autocratic Russia. They reflect the cultural anxieties of the nobleman who does not formally serve the state, after the emancipation of the nobility by Peter III in 1762, but who still feels a patriotic obligation to be of use. This sense of duty finds expression in the landowner’s performance of the role of manager of an ancestral estate. (Grigoryan makes it clear that it is the male landowner she is dealing with, not the noblewoman, who frequently did manage the family estate but whose social identity was not so closely bound up with this role.) The landowner might wonder whether nobility was an innate characteristic or a ‘set of qualities’ that could be ‘acquired, learned and cultivated, or performed’ (p. 48). Up to a point, he was ‘a man created by the public discourse of the epoch’ (p. 66). Thus, in the prose of the period in question, Grigoryan argues, the notion of noble identity in its various ‘iterations’ was ‘novelized’. Given the productivity of Russia’s classical prose writers and the breadth and depth of their engagement with social and political issues, selection of texts to study is bound to present difficulties. Grigoryan’s focus on a small number of...