L'istituzione del matrimonio in Tolstoj. ‘Felicità familiare’, ‘Anna Karenina’, ‘La sonata a Kreutzer’ by Maria Zalambani (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 735 data, clear explanations, interesting theoretical approaches and by raising new questions. This book is a model of how productive results can be when linguists with various orientations collaborate. University of Chicago/La Trobe University Victor A. Friedman Zalambani, Maria. L’istituzione del matrimonio in Tolstoj. ‘Felicità familiare’, ‘Anna Karenina’, ‘La sonata a Kreutzer’. Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici, 27. Firenze University Press, Firenze, 2015. 206 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €16.90 (paperback). After one hundred and fifty years of Tolstoi criticism of the most varied orientations, it is intriguing to be presented with a sort of return to Nikolai Dobroliubov’s real criticism, i.e. the sociologic analysis of reality with the aid of literature. In The Institution of Marriage in Tolstoi: ‘Family Happiness’, ‘Anna Karenina’, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, Maria Zalambani, a well-known specialist of twentieth-century Russian literature and literary institutions, uses Lev Tolstoi’s family ‘trilogy’ to investigate the transformations of the marriage institution in nineteenth-century Russia. Paradoxically, while Family Happiness (1858– 59), Zalambani maintains, anticipates certain themes of the future ‘bourgeois marriage’ based on love, Anna Karenina (1875–77) witnesses the deep crisis of the traditional aristocratic ‘marriage of convenience’, while The Kreutzer Sonata (1887–91) comes to deny the institution of marriage itself. Following a short introduction, Zalambani’s first chapter illustrates the strict relationship between literature and society in tsarist Russia, and Tolstoi’s role not only in mirroring, but also in promoting, albeit unintentionally, social and cultural change. The second chapter is devoted to Family Happiness and illustrates the woman’s question from the late eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century. While in Russian society and, due to new ‘French influences’ (Michelet, Proudhon), especially in radical journals, the patriarchal system began to be questioned, in Tolstoi’s story the heroine Masha, who is initially in love with her husband and eager to share with him every aspect of life, eventually bends to a ‘family happiness’ that transcends conjugal love. The third and fourth chapters, on Anna Karenina and The Kreutzer Sonata, are divided into two parts: the first illustrates the kind of marriage dealt with in the novel and story respectively; the second is devoted to the reception of the works, both by contemporaries and in the following decades. Zalambani relies on early and more recent socio-historical studies in her elucidation of the many aspects of the ‘marriage of convenience’: the prevalent influence of the Church, the mechanisms of power in the patriarchal family, the difficulty of divorce and separation,theimpactofthejuridicalreformsofthe1860s.Detailedparagraphs SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 736 devoted to the reception of Anna Karenina show that almost no contemporary critic was able to fully understand Anna’s challenge to the institution itself. Both populist and conservative critics and writers (Mikhailovskii, Tkachev, Suvorin, Skabichevskii, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Turgenev, V. Markov, Vs. Solov´ev, V. Avseenko, Leont´ev, Dostoevskii) concentrated their attention on the private aspects of her drama and on the social milieu in which it is played out. With a few exceptions (A. Fet, A. B. Vano, Vl. Golitsyn), critics of every orientation agreed in condemning Anna’s immoral choice and the theme of adultery as non-Russian. After a useful reconstruction of the writing and publication of The Kreutzer Sonata, Zalambani analyses the ‘bourgeois marriage’ at the heart of Pozdnyshev’s tragedy in light of Michel Foucault’s ‘dispositif of sexuality’, and examines its various aspects (juridical innovation; the role of love and sex; divorce). The reception of the story in Russia saw the Church, religious writers and populist critics defend conjugal sex from Pozdnyshev’s/Tolstoi’s attacks, prompting readers to react with deep participation. This movement initiated a new debate about sexuality that culminated in the philosophical works of Vl. Solov´ev and V. Rozanov and which also extended into Symbolist poetry. A short final chapter, ‘Towards a conclusion’, revisits the main points of the volume, arguing that behind the ‘marriage of convenience’ and the ‘bourgeois marriage’ depicted in Tolstoi’s ‘trilogy’ the Russian family remained a disciplinary authority where no real happiness was possible. All quotations from Zalambani’s rich and varied bibliography are given in Italian translation, and in her own...