In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America
  • Elizabeth Cheresh Allen (bio)
Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America. By Anne Lounsbery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. ix + 342 pp. $45.00.

The twentieth century taught Americans to think of Russia and America in terms of opposites: autocratic/democratic, communist/capitalist, collectivist/ individualist, and so on. But in Thin Culture, High Art: Gogol, Hawthorne, [End Page 542] and Authorship in Nineteenth-Century Russia and America Anne Lounsbery demonstrates that, however “radically disparate” (1), Russia and America shared some formative cultural conditions in the nineteenth century. These were the conditions of nascent literary cultures striving to establish themselves on the periphery of the advanced literary cultures of Western Europe at the dawn of commercial publishing and what would later become mass culture. These conditions induced some strikingly similar cultural aspirations and insecurities.

Lounsbery makes her case by focusing on the contemporaneous authors Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64). Although they never read one another, Lounsbery finds “almost uncanny . . . similarities” between them as “perhaps the two most important writers” (1) of their times, when “authorship barely existed in their societies as a profession” (19).

An introductory chapter illustrates these common peripheral historical conditions and places Gogol and Hawthorne within them. “Despite or even because of the culture’s thinness and its divergence from European standards,” Lounsbery writes, these two authors aspired to help launch national literary traditions “that would far surpass contemporary European literature in profundity, universal significance, and prophetic power” (20–21). Those ambitions might have been extravagant, but, Lounsbery argues, Gogol and Hawthorne “were greeted as harbingers” of literary achievements that would shape “a collective national identity,” and they “ended [their] careers as National Authors par excellence” (19).

Lounsbery follows the parallel careers of her authors (while acknowledging pronounced distinctions) through three chronological phases. In Part One, devoted to the first phase, she examines early texts that reflected yearnings to create national literary traditions amidst the ascendancy of commercial “print culture.” This ascendancy brought Gogol and Hawthorne an expanding reading public and gave many of their preoccupations “profound cultural implications well outside the literary sphere” (120). But at the same time, that ascendancy induced in these authors a disquieting sense of “the writer’s vulnerability in a world of print” (121) owing to the growing influence of the publishing industry and its unreliable public.

In Part Two, Lounsbery carries the story forward by scrutinizing two major novels: Gogol’s Dead Souls and Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables. In these works, she maintains, the authors “reveal their own doubts about the possibility of making art” and fostering worthy literary cultures in such “inauspicious circumstances”—unlike Western Europe, where most literary cultures had matured centuries earlier. Spurred by these doubts, Gogol [End Page 543] and Hawthorne exposed “the thinness of their cultural materials” while expecting their novels to “be read as books about the nation” and “as works of art deserving of serious interpretive labor.” Hence both authors sought at once “to encourage and to obstruct interpretation” (193) among an expanding reading public of questionable tastes and judgment.

In Part Three Lounsbery explores later works connected with each writer’s sojourn in Rome—Gogol lived there for nearly a decade, Hawthorne for almost two years. Both viewed the city as a cultural touchstone, but in somewhat contrary ways. “Where Gogol saw in the Italian capital a colossality promising an antidote to modernity’s fragmentation and excess, Hawthorne [saw] in Rome’s ubiquitous artworks and messy ruins an image of his own age’s superabundance of print and images” (244). Lounsbery’s close readings of Gogol’s stories set in St. Petersburg and Rome and Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (along with short excursions into other works) show that, although Gogol took a certain inspiration from Rome’s venerable artistic tradition and Hawthorne regarded the city as a potentially deleterious artistic influence, they jointly drew from their Roman experiences a deeper concern that modern commerce would debase art and complicate the creation of vital artistic cultures in their own countries.

In her...

pdf