Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 by Bella Grigoryan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 by Bella Grigoryan Anna A. Berman GRIGORYAN, BELLA. Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861. Dekalb, IL: NIU Press, 2018. 189 pp. $39.00 paper. “Nobility” is a notoriously slippery concept in the Imperial Russian context. Noble status could be inherited or could be earned through service, raising questions about what it actually meant to be a Russian nobleman. As Grigoryan’s new study shows, these questions were central to the Russian literary tradition in the nineteenth century. Combining detailed historical research with close readings of literary works, Noble Subjects brings little-studied agricultural texts and advice literature into dialogue with canonical literature, revealing the close interrelationship between the two. Breaking free of the tendency to focus on a very limited range of Russia’s “literary giants” and to assume their uniqueness, Grigoryan instead places the subjects of her study in their historical and literary context, offering balanced explanations that “historicize various aspects of Tolstoy’s work,” for example, and explain them “as not just ‘Tolstoyan’ (read: protean, strange), but also as all but determined by Russian imperial culture and political history” (8). In so doing, the book provides a timely reminder of the dangers of myopic study of single “geniuses.” The first chapter takes up the eighteenth-century ideal of the noble farmer who serves the Tsar by being a good estate manager and “picking up the plow.” Grigoryan traces how this figure of the gentleman farmer was cultivated in the burgeoning new journals that appeared during Catherine the Great’s reign, focusing particularly on the creation of the Free Economic Society and its quarterly periodical, Transactions, along with the writings of Nikolai Novikov, Andrei Bolotov, and Nikolai Karamzin. Chapter Two then traces the noble estate owner through the notes, unfinished literary writings, and published prose of Alexander Pushkin, beginning from Pushkin’s 1830 question: “The Russian nobility—what does it mean now?” (47). The question will stay relevant for the next half century. At issue, ultimately, is the “inherited character of noble identity” versus nobility as “the product chiefly of practice and cultivation” (55, 61). To my mind, Grigoryan’s book fully comes into its own in the middle chapters on Faddei Bulgarin and Nikolai Gogol. Here, Noble Subjects delves into the polemics in the periodical press about estate management and agriculture. Writing in his Northern Bee and Ekonom, a Universally Useful Domestic Library, Bulgarin cultivated “the persona of an exemplary pomeshchik and an authoritative voice in the growing market of how-to literature about home life” (73). His rivals, too, took up the personae of “everyman” landowners, their articles and reviews aimed at the “middling” public (srednee sostoianie), not just the nobility. Together, they facilitated the rise of what Grigoryan calls “middlebrow institutions of Russian print culture” (69). In the journals as well as in Bulgarin’s novel Ivan Vyzhigin (1829) we see again and again “a cliché of Nikolaevan agricultural literature: that the nobleman may serve the state in his capacity as a good steward of property” (71). Yet, as Grigoryan will show in the Conclusion on Anna Karenina, this idea is also vulnerable, and Konstantin Levin, for one, feels insecure about his choice to work only on his estate. Continuing to look at the influence of middlebrow agricultural and domestic writing, Chapter Four illuminates the relationship between Dead Souls (especially the unfinished Part Two) and its media environment. Through close readings, Grigoryan reveals the ways Gogol polemicized against and parodied Bulgarin, while similarly positioning himself as a writer of advice literature. She makes the bold—but well justified—claim that “the expanded Bulgarin intertext of [the unfinished] volume two may be emblematic of a veritable vocational shift in Gogol’s work” (91). Having [End Page 318] read her meticulously researched argument, it would be difficult not to agree. Gogol’s famous (and bizarre) invitation to readers in the preface to the 1846 republication of Dead Souls to send him suggestions on how to improve the novel suddenly makes new sense as Grigoryan reminds us that “[f]or authors of advice literature, the invitation that readers aid them in the enterprise...