Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov by Vadim Shneyder

Abstract

Reviewed by: Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov by Vadim Shneyder Jonathan Paine Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. By Vadim Shneyder. (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2021. xii+248 pp. $120. ISBN 978-0-81014-249-7. It is a pleasure to welcome another new face to the growing ranks of economic criticism. In this, his debut monograph, Vadim Shneyder asks a crucial question: how did Russian novelists deal with the growth of capitalism in the nineteenth century? His study is not just a model of close textual criticism; it illustrates how thoroughly economic awareness pervades the Russian nineteenth-century novel. Whereas Western European counterparts often embraced the representation of economic change as a dynamic force in shaping novelistic plot and character, Shneyder argues that Russian writers struggled to describe Russia's idiosyncratic absorption of an industrial revolution which other nations had experienced decades earlier. He concludes: 'the experience of capitalism forced Russian writers to [End Page 319] confront the limits of literary representation and [. . .] some of the greatest works of Russian realist literature incorporated these limits into their structure' (p. 173). In this wide-ranging study, he shows how even the most conventional emblems of industrialization, such as the factory, are treated as either un-narratable because monotonous and banal, or else incomprehensible because unfamiliar and chaotic. Tolstoi, he suggests, incorporates the intrusion of this new capitalist society into Anna Karenina by the device of opposing two couples: Anna and Vronskii, represented by chaotic images of railroads, urban society, and extravagant consumption, and Levin and Kitty, represented by the synchrony of mowing hay in a timeless rural idyll. Dostoevskii confronts the implications of new economic patterns more directly, in Shneyder's perceptive analysis. The Idiot illustrates the developing schism between traditional merchants, represented by Rogozhin, and the new generation of emerging capitalists, such as Totskii and Epanchin. The merchants belong to an essentially sterile economy in which cash, symbolized by the wad of notes with which Rogozhin tries to buy Nastasia Filippovna, is the only means of exchange and yet proves immutable and unproductive. Notes may pass from hand to hand but never yield anything; and the merchants exist as a separate, closed society, represented by Rogozhin's Gothic house. Capitalists, by contrast, exist only on the fringes of the novel. Although not a subject of narrative interest, they persist as a pervasive background theme. By the time The Brothers Karamazov appeared in 1881, the transactional theme of money has become both invasive and insistent, advancing to the foreground. The sum of 3000 roubles, at the core of the novel's plot, symbolizes not just the consistency but the arbitrariness of exchange value. Dostoevskii's representation of the capitalist economy undermines faith in the validity of any kind of equivalence—a corrosive perspective which may attack the moral basis of society itself. Shneyder's tour of the realist horizon ends with Chekhov. Once again, he contends, 'the progress of capitalism threaten[s] the intelligibility of the world' (p. 174). Representing factories and other processes of economic production may now be unavoidable, since they provide the backdrop to many of Chekhov's stories, but his protagonists still fail to understand them. The bored bourgeoisie coexists with its economic means of support while trying to ignore or suppress it. Shneyder is at his impressive best when he stays closest to the text. His chapter on The Idiot is a remarkable demonstration of how the application of a particular textual grille de lecture, in this case the focus on how money circulates through the text, can deliver genuinely original insights into the novel's construction as a response to contemporary economic trends. His broader conclusions reflect established lines of criticism, but his particular skill is to provide new evidence through his sensitivity to the text. This is a valuable and readable contribution—Shneyder writes well—to our assessment of how Russian realism reacted to the spread of Western economic disciplines. Shneyder concentrates on how nineteenth-century writers addressed the challenge of representing—or failing to represent—these changing economic frameworks in their texts. The other side of this coin...